And The Winner Is...
World Cup of Sondheim post-tournament analysis | Plus, more from our conversation with Jonathan Roxmouth, our latest Sondheim crossword, and more
13 votes.
After 64 songs, 16 groups, multiple knockout rounds, and more imaginary sporting drama than any of us could reasonably have anticipated, that is all that separated the winner of our World Cup of Sondheim from the runner-up.
On Instagram, where poll percentages are displayed only as whole numbers, the final result appeared as a perfect dead heat: 50% to 50%. The bars met in the middle. Nothing divided them. Only the vote tallies revealed that the winning song had edged ahead by the smallest of margins.
Had seven voters changed sides, “Sunday” would have won by a single vote. Instead, “Being Alive” has been crowned champion of the inaugural World Cup of Sondheim.
Yes, the tournament remains ludicrous. But having taken the whole enterprise very seriously for several weeks, we are certainly not going to stop now.
The road to the final
For much of the tournament, “Sunday” appeared unstoppable.
It began by taking 68% of one of the strongest groups in the opening stage. By the Round of 16, it was dismantling formidable opposition. “Send in the Clowns,” Sondheim’s most famous song beyond the boundaries of musical theatre, received just 24% against it. “Sunday” took 76%, the second-largest victory of that round.
In the quarter-final, “The Ladies Who Lunch” — which had already defeated “Old Friends” by 54% to 46% — managed just 30% to “Sunday”’s 70%.
Then came an all-Sunday in the Park with George semi-final against “Move On.” That song had dispatched “No One Is Alone” by 53% to 47%, then beaten “Losing My Mind” more comfortably, 58% to 42%. But against “Sunday,” even “Move On” could gather only 37%.
“Sunday” entered the final having taken 76%, 70%, and 63% in its previous three rounds. Its opponents were gaining ground, certainly, but none had come close to catching it.
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The progress of “Being Alive” was less serenely consistent but at times even more emphatic. In the Round of 16, “Being Alive” defeated “No More” by 82% to 18%, receiving the highest individual vote tally of the round.
Its quarter-final against “Finishing the Hat” presented a far more serious challenge. “Finishing the Hat” had just swept aside “Not While I’m Around” by 71% to 29%, and its formidable reputation made the tie feel genuinely heavyweight. But “Being Alive” won 60% to 40%.
Then came the semi-final. “Another Hundred People” had been one of the tournament’s most impressive competitors. It won 62% of its group-stage vote, defeated “Pretty Women” 58% to 42% in the Round of 16, and survived an extraordinarily close quarter-final against “Your Fault.” That contest was decided by 51% to 49%.
But the semi-final itself offered no such suspense. “Being Alive” defeated “Another Hundred People” by 85% to 15%: the largest victory of the entire concluding phase.
So: one finalist arrived having won 63% of its semi-final. The other arrived with 85%.
Then they divided the electorate almost exactly in half.
From squeakers to slaughterings
The later rounds produced a fascinating mixture of near-ties and landslides.
The Round of 16 began with “Losing My Mind” defeating “Getting Married Today” by 51% to 49%. The difference was 22 votes. Something simpler, almost unbearably exposed, met that famously virtuosic comic breakdown — and, on this occasion at least, the quieter kind of emotional directness narrowly prevailed.
In another close tie, “The Ladies Who Lunch” beat “Old Friends” 54% to 46%. But elsewhere, the same round was ruthless. “Your Fault” beat “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” 72% to 28%. “Finishing the Hat” beat “Not While I’m Around” 71% to 29%. And “Being Alive” delivered that 82% to 18% defeat to “No More.”
The matches became no more predictable in the quarter-finals. “Sunday” and “Being Alive” continued their advance, while “Move On” ended the run of “Losing My Mind.” But the finest quarter-final drama belonged to “Another Hundred People” and “Your Fault,” separated by only two percentage points.
It offered a neat warning against treating the previous round as any kind of prophecy. “Your Fault” had just won 72% of its vote; “Another Hundred People” had won 58%. Judged solely on momentum, “Your Fault” appeared stronger. In direct competition, it lost.
That has been one of the tournament’s most persistent lessons: a percentage measures only how a song performs against that particular opponent, among those particular voters, on that particular day. Routes matter. Matchups matter. The apparent force of a victory can vanish as soon as the opposition changes.
The Company–Sunday championship
By the quarter-finals, something remarkable had happened. Six of the remaining eight songs came from only two shows. Company had “The Ladies Who Lunch,” “Another Hundred People,” and “Being Alive.” Sunday in the Park with George had “Move On,” “Sunday,” and “Finishing the Hat.” Only “Losing My Mind,” from Follies, and “Your Fault,” from Into the Woods, stood outside that duopoly. Both were eliminated in the quarter-finals.
The World Cup of Sondheim had become, in effect, the Company–Sunday in the Park with George Invitational.
That concentration builds on a pattern visible much earlier in the tournament. As I noted after the group stage, affection was not distributed evenly across Sondheim’s canon. Into the Woods and Sunday in the Park with George had supplied 12 of the original 32 knockout qualifiers. Add Company, Merrily We Roll Along, and Sweeney Todd, and 24 of the 32 came from five shows.
By the semi-finals, even that core repertoire had contracted dramatically. Merrily was gone. Sweeney was gone. Into the Woods was gone. And consider the final four. “Move On” is about art, relationship, continuation, and the necessity of proceeding without certainty. “Sunday” gathers disconnected figures into a completed work. “Another Hundred People” locates loneliness and possibility amid the endless movement of a city. “Being Alive” moves, as Sondheim so famously put it, from complaint to prayer.
These are all, in different ways, songs about how we exist among other people.
Perhaps the final rounds revealed something more specific than meets the eye about the emotions to which voters responded most powerfully. Connection. Isolation. Community. The desire to be seen. The fear of being known. The need to move towards other people despite everything that other people can do to us.
By the end, the tournament had discarded most of its comic songs, its elaborate theatrical machines, and its numbers most dependent on dramatic context. What remained were songs that could function as declarations of belief.
And then two of those declarations met.
Why “Being Alive”?
There is often a temptation, after a result, to invent an explanation so complete that the outcome begins to feel inevitable. We should resist that. “Being Alive” did not win because it possesses some measurable quality that “Sunday” lacks. A margin of 13 votes is not enough to support any such claim. A slightly different set of voters, a different posting time, seven people changing their minds: any of these could have produced the opposite champion.
But the result does seem consistent with what the tournament has shown us from its beginning.
“Being Alive” is exceptionally portable. It emerges from a precise and sophisticated dramatic situation, but its emotional argument travels easily beyond it. A listener does not need to know every detail of Bobby’s life to understand the movement from self-protection towards connection. The song has become an anthem because we can all enter it ourselves.
Its contradictions are also central to its power. To be connected is to be crowded, frightened, disrupted, disappointed. The song passes through that ambivalence and decides that life with others is worth its dangers.
“Sunday” is no less emotionally direct, but its effect is different. It asks us to stand before an act of creation and witness separate fragments becoming whole. It is theatrical transcendence: many voices, many colors, many lives arranged into one luminous image.
The final whistle
So, what has the World Cup of Sondheim established?
Not that “Being Alive” is definitively Sondheim’s greatest song. Not that “Sunday” is his second-greatest. Not that “Another Hundred People” is objectively superior to “Finishing the Hat,” or that “Your Fault” has been permanently ranked below “Losing My Mind.” The bracket was shaped by its groups, its routes, its pairings, and the peculiar pressures of Instagram polling. Run the same tournament again, and we could produce a substantially different result.
What it has established is that thousands of us were willing to gather around these songs, argue over them, defend them, and make painful choices between them. It has shown us the enormous continuing strength of a core group of shows, while reminding us how differently songs function when separated from their theatrical surroundings. It has suggested that familiarity matters, portability matters, and emotional immediacy matters.
Most of all, it has shown that, when forced into a direct choice between two of Sondheim’s most beloved songs, we could barely choose at all. The trophy is imaginary. The 13-vote margin is real.
It is cruel. It is absurd. It is magnificent sporting theatre.
And along the way, if this tournament prompted even a handful of voters to discover new Sondheim or rediscover old favorites, the whole ludicrous enterprise has been worth it.
Below, this week’s Sondheim crossword, more from our conversation with Jonathan Roxmouth, and, as ever, our guide to This Week in Sondheim: