Most Overrated Song:

“Send in the Clowns,” words and music by Stephen Sondheim. The decline of the American theater song from real to pseudo sophistication can be measured in the distance from Stephen Sondheim’s work on “Gee, Officer Krupke” or “Somewhere” in West Side Story (1957) to this mystifyingly popular 1973 ballad from A Little Night Music . The just-over-anoctave range and talky, note-y melody make it easy prey for nightclub singers, but they should steer clear. In its dramatic context the fact that the song is delivered by an aging actress jilted by an old lover is some mitigation for its selfmocking, histrionic attitude: “Isn’t it rich?…Making my entrance again / with my usual flair, / sure of my lines, / no one is there.…Don’t you love farce?” On its own it becomes embarrassingly self-dramatizing. The image of the clowns is meant to lend pathos, but it is a pathos the song never earns, so it registers only as artsy-kitschy cliché, like painting on velvet. The clowns, the oh-so-sophisticated irony, and the solemn repetition of musical phrases cross the line into pretentiousness —death to any popular art form and the last thing one would have expected from the author of “Krupke.” Taking itself too seriously, the song never breaks through to real feeling. That American Song: The Complete Musical Theater Companion calls it “one of the great theater songs” makes it a shoo-in for this honor.

Most Underrated Song:

“Skylark,” music by Hoagy Carmichael, lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Given the astounding wealth of wonderful American songs, picking a most underrated one is tough. Rodgers and Hart’s “It Never Entered My Mind” and Kern’s “All the Things You Are” may be underplayed, but these great theater composers, with their colleagues Berlin and Porter and the Gershwins, are now getting their due in the concert hall. Among lesser-known gems, there’s Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf’s jazzy ballad “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” written for the 1959 show The Nervous Set . It is a witty and moving update of “Spring Is Here”: “Morning’s kiss wakes trees and flowers, / and to them I’d like to drink a toast.…Spring arrived on time, / only what became of you, dear?” June Christy’s sexy performance, throaty and California casual, is a perfect match for the song’s fifties beatnik cool, though Ella Fitzgerald isn’t bad either. But so obscure a choice feels like cheating.

There are more unsung (in both senses) classics among the lower class of composers who wrote for Tin Pan Alley and the movies. One very strong candidate is the sublime 1942 “There Will Never Be Another You,” by Mack Gordon and the great Harry Warren, probably our most underrated songwriter. I’ll give the nod, though, to Carmichael and Mercer’s haunting 1941 masterpiece “Skylark.” which has been unfairly overshadowed by work each did with other