Translation Results Requested Through Conyac Made Public

"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,