"I'm Still Here", from Sondheim's 1971 show FOLLIES (with book by James Goldman), is one of Sondheim's most well known and most often sung pieces, a bring-the-house-down showstopper.
The Set-Up: Movie and TV star Carlotta Campion is one of a group of former Follies girls who have gathered together with their spouses to say goodbye to the soon-to-be-demolished theatre where they all performed as young women.
Campion is in fact just a minor character in the musical, but its Follies-style revue structure gives each character a song of their own.
The Performance: There's many performances of this song to choose from. I'm going to post Christine Baranski's version here at the top. It's not the best looking, but for another reason that I'll mention below I think it's the best to see. But I'll also post Elaine Paige's performance from an actual full-on production at the bottom.
The Storytelling: I debated doing "I'm Still Here" after "The Ladies Who Lunch" (or at all). While thematically they're opposites--"Ladies" about the seeming inescapability of despair and "Here" about the refusal to do so--the two songs use a nearly identical structure of stanzas which each offer details around different elements of the theme.
Despite that similarity, I decided to do "Here" because it is such a major song in Sondheim's catalog. And as it turns out I think the insights to be gained from it actually prove to be a little different.
1) The Power of Repetition on a Journey
In "Here", each stanza takes on a different aspect of the hardship of a life in theatre -- the poverty; having to deal with fads; fucking up your own life; and the whiplash rollercoaster ride of success and failure. But unlike "Ladies", the elements collected here do not just represent an aggregate of assortments. Sondheim sees the stanzas as walking the audience through the journey of a performer over time. You show up with nothing and struggle to live with that while you look for work; eventually you find your way into some success, but also lots of opportunity for self-destruction; and no matter what success you eventually achieve, eventually you're back to dealing with the fact that no one remembers you.
At the same time, the song doesn't telegraph that journey. There's no overt sense of one thing following upon the next. Some performances make an effort to make that clear; that's why I chose Baranski's version. Her Carlotta is clearly drunk and kind of pathetic. And slowly over the course of the song she gets more confident, until she is belting out that ending like nobody's business. But Paige offers far less of that--and most versions follow her, not Baranski.
What the song does do is make the title its persistent refrain. 21 times in the piece, in fact, Carlotta sings some version of it: "I'm Still Here";"and I'm here" or "but I'm here."
On the face of it that repetition seems like it should translate to a sense of endless stasis, not progress. But in fact the repetition trains us to look forward to each next use. What else has this actress been through that she refuses to let condemn her?
And the words become like a pebble rolling down a mountain, gaining momentum simply by virtue of being said again and again. Even as her circumstances actually grow more dire -- at the end she's forgotten again -- by the time we get there her refusal to quit has created a sense of triumph rather than collapse.
2) Bookends Satisfy
The song's last stanza begins the very same way the first stanza did, "Good Times and Bum Times, I've Seen Them All..." And that kind of bookending has interesting uses.
First of all, it's a signpost telling us that we're at the end, which generates further anticipation (while also undercutting any sense of boredom that might be waiting in the wings within us). It's basically a way of signalling This is it, everybody, Big Finish.
Pointing back to the beginning also naturally creates a sense of journey. You can't be back where you started if you didn't go somewhere in between. Much like the classic hero story, where the hero having been on their quest comes home again with new skills and perspective to bring to bear on life there, ending a story as you began it gives a sense of culmination and of a final gift to be bestowed.
Lastly, I find there's something just deeply satisfying about ending where you started. It has a feeling of craftsmanship or artful planning that speaks to us on a subconscious level. It's the same thing as looking at a handmade chair or a bespoke suit; even if I'm not savvy enough to appreciate fully what I'm looking at, still the object itself generates a great appreciation.
Craftsmanship always improves our sense of the stories and world before us.
