I cry when I hear this - no, not just a few tears but sobbing, full-on weeping, every single time, and just now when I heard it again. I am fascinated with Anthony Perkins and am once again making my way through a very difficult biography of him by Charles Winecoff. I say difficult because he really is presented warts and all, with an astounding degree of complexity and outright contradiction. He was so many things to so many people, some of them diametrically opposed, but all of it was real. Some of it was baffling and strange and even offputting, though he never violated his own integrity. So we have this fleeting, fragile two minutes in time from a musical everyone has forgotten. Greenwillow was a flop and only ran to near-empty houses for a few performances, and he had a cold when they did the original cast recording so there's a little catch in his voice on the high note at the end. He is speaking to us, just talking to us, telling us his soul, his complex and contradictory soul, in the simplest language you can imagine. Who can do that? No one else I can think of. Anyway, I haven't cried for a long time, not since those wretched dark deep nights of the pandemic when I thought the loneliness would never end. But this is different, and it's not like anything else I can even think of. I was sure it wouldn't affect me this time - like every time - and within a few seconds I was sobbing.
