"Out Come Pagliacci, Also Liberace"

Here's another song from Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's score for Jamaica, this one involving not the late Ricardo Montalban but the show's top-billed star, Lena Horne. This was her show-stopping number (though her attempt to record it as a single was not a success, and I don't think I've ever even heard the single version). The lyric is Harburg's usual tweaking of American commercialism -- '50s-style, rather than the '40s-style commercialism satirized in Finian's Rainbow. And Arlen, as he often did, creates a long song with a complicated structure; no two sections of the refrain are really the same, and a section of the slow, dreamy verse becomes the energetic middle section of the refrain.

Because Horne wasn't really a theatre singer and had a relatively small-sized voice (great, but not big), she reportedly used amplification for her numbers; she also got her husband, arranger Lennie Hayton, to re-do the orchestrations for her songs so they were more congenial to her voice. The result was perfectly defensible, but reinforced the feeling that the show was more a pop showcase than a play.