[1] Other performers who have sung the song in later productions of Follies include Barbara Cook (1985), Julia McKenzie (1987), Donna McKechnie (1998), Judith Ivey (2001), Victoria Clark (2007),[1]Bernadette Peters (2011) and Imelda Staunton (2017).

The song "expresses her preoccupation with Ben, her idealized lover...With infinite attention to detail, Sondheim leads Sally from sunrise to sleepless night, revealing that every second of her existence is defined by her longing...the number ...explores the extent to which she has lost herself in this make-believe world of undying desire.

[9] Joe Brown from The Washington Post wrote, "Minnelli utterly misses the song's irony and delicacy, playing it instead as if she's literally going nuts, complete with a mid-song electronic freak-out fugue and a spoken soliloquy, guaranteed to raise a camp clamor on the dance floor.

[11] More recently, theater scholar Jordan Schildcrout interpreted the song as a commentary on Minnelli's status as a celebrity in the late 1980s, writing: "I find it easy to imagine Liza singing, 'You said you loved me/Or were you just being kind?'

not to any man (as depicted in the neo-noir video of the song), but to the audience and the entertainment industry that gave her a Tony, Oscar, and Emmy by the age of 27 and then dismissed her as a camp joke.