is generally agreed, to a time before songs were integrated into the story and advanced character and plot. (Hall, again, thinks otherwise: "The songs put fantastic detail on the ideas so you can visualise them, and, in doing so, they progress the story.") But, during the out-of-town try-outs, one of his numbers did something even more important than becoming a popular hit: it saved the show from closing on the road. Despite its hilarious script, Forum was dying, one night even playing to an audience of 50, when the director Jerome Robbins was brought in to doctor it. He diagnosed a need for an opening song that would make it clear, from the first, what kind of show the spectators were about to see. Sondheim came up with "Comedy Tonight", a shamelessly hucksterish number that sold the show to its audiences so well, they immediately changed from apathetic to ecstatic. ("They don't even", Barrit says, "have time to catch their breath.") This witty version of a variety-show opener trips along until the end of the bridge, when it slouches into a Mae West-style come-on, revelling in its own shamelessness. Miles' triumphal march steals from up-tempo good-time songs as well as pompous Hollywood music when he announces: "There are lands to conquer, cities to loot and people to degrade!" The one show-stopper, "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid", highlights the jokes with burlesque beats: "Oh! Oh! Wouldn't she be delightful, sweeping out (boom!), sleeping in (boom!)." n fact, the whole show