The feeling I dread the most is not fear but despair—the dim, oppressive sense that the more things change, the more they stay the same; that each of us with a frozen heart like an old-stone savage armed will continue to move in darkness, lifting boulders, patrolling the firmaments of divisive anger.

Before that she reminded me a little too much, in her rortyness, of the serio-comic lady who sings 'What cheer Ria, Ria's on the job!'

The other was to go on, to the next drink or the bed or the grass outside, where the party-noises ebbed and flowed like shell-shocks and the Southern Cross burnt crookedly above.

At its most basic, this is thunderingly enjoyable Victorian melodrama. But as always in Sondheim, there is a marvellous intelligence and wit at work.