"Six by Sondheim" Keeps Up HBO's Track Record for Great Documentaries | Features

On the other side of success is "Merrily We Roll Along," the 1981 musical that closed after 16 performances. From this, "Six By Sondheim" extracts its second number, "Opening Doors." Described by Sondheim as his most autobiographical song, "Doors" is presented as a two-part vignette directed by Lapine and starring Ugly Betty's America Ferrera, Glee's Darren Criss and Jeremy Jordan. This is a gorgeously rendered number, with special effects and cuts as quick as Sondheim's lyrics.

"I was trying to recapture what I was like when I was 25 and 30 years old," Sondheim says. (He was 25 when "West Side Story" debuted.) Lapine saves his biggest surprise for us during the second part of this number, when Sondheim appears as a Broadway producer chastising the lead characters. Who better to sing a litany of actual criticisms of Stephen Sondheim songs than Sondheim himself?

One of those criticisms is the lack of "hummable" melodies in Sondheim's material. People want to walk out of a show humming the tunes, we are told, and with Sondheim, that was rarely possible. "I hate that word, hummable," complains Sondheim in more than one interview clip. This characteristic, or lack thereof, is supposedly why the musicals for which Sondheim wrote music and lyrics produced few hits. The one hit they did spawn is the third song in "Six by Sondheim," "Send in the Clowns" from "A Little Night Music." Hummable or not, until "My Humps," "Send in the Clowns" was my least favorite song. "Six by Sondheim" made me pay for that, with interest.

"Glynis Johns wasn't a singer with a capital S," says Sondheim, so he wrote "Clowns" as an easy number for her to sing. Sondheim's descriptions of the pauses between lyrics so that Johns could catch her breath are completely obliterated by footage of Patti Labelle, who fills those empty spaces with over-the-top vocal pyrotechnics as only Miss Patti can. Editor Miky Wolf, whose work is superb here, strings together YouTube clips of numerous interpreters of the song, from Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins (who made it a hit) to Carol Burnett, Dame Judi Dench, and Liz Taylor, who sang it in the dreadful movie version of "A Little Night Music." Audra McDonald, a singer with a capital S, provides a current rendition for the documentary.

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