By Steven Suskin
05 Dec 2010

Enough has been said about the numerous celebrations of Stephen Sondheim's 80th birthday to make any more discussion superfluous. High among the festivities were not one but three major benefit birthday concerts in Manhattan last spring, which competed for the same audiences and the same performers. One of them, the New York Philharmonic's affair, is now commercially available. Sondheim! The Birthday Concert [Image] features as fine a roster of Broadway stars as you are likely ever to see in one place at one time; rather than list 'em all, it's simpler to say that it has just about every extant Sondheim star you can think of except Angela Lansbury, Chita Rivera, and Len Cariou. Lonny Price directed, Paul Gemignani was musical director, David Hyde Pierce served as host, and the program is full of highlights. (Of course, given the talents involved you would expect it to be full of highlights.) Let us note that this concert was telecast on PBS stations as a Thanksgiving special, although in some markets it was interspersed with endless pledge breaks and in others significant sections were cut. "Sondheim: The Birthday Concert," available on both DVD and Blu-ray, runs a full 116 minutes.

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And what would the holidays be without a package from Disney? And some package it is. Fantasia has been re-released, now in high definition Blu-ray. And Walt's one-of-a-kind 1940 extravaganza of music and color is custom-made for high definition, don't you think? Disney has put it in a four-disc combo pack, bundled with "Fantasia 2000" (which isn't quite the classic that the original — made under Walt's personal supervision — is). The two included Blu-ray discs are loaded with extras, as one would expect from Disney; the final two discs are DVD versions of the "Fantasia" and "Fantasia 2000," without the array of bonuses. Disney is also selling the two DVDs as a package, without all those bonuses, at a slightly lower price than the four-disc Blu-ray set.

Also from Disney comes The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story. This is a documentary about the brothers Richard M. and Robert B., Walt's in-house songwriters — his only in-house songwriters ever — known the world round for "Mary Poppins" and that fiendishly irrepressible song written for the 1964 World's Fair, "It's a Small World." (They are also the composer-lyricists of the stage musicals Over Here! and Busker Alley, although those songs never made anyone's hit parade.) Of what interest can a documentary about two Disney writers be?

Well, let us say from the start that the brothers make it very interesting in spite of themselves. It turns out that the guys don't like each other; so much so that Jeffrey Sherman and Gregory Sherman, the film's director/producers and the sons of Robert and Richard respectively, grew up virtually separated from each other. That's right. While their fathers continued collaborating on films and shows, the families were forcibly kept apart; at openings, they would literally be seated on separate sides of the theatre. (Upon the death of their father, Tin Pan Alley composer Al Sherman, the brothers held separate receptions at their respective houses — with the other side excluded.)

The two sons of the two songwriting brothers broke the ice at the 2002 London opening of the stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, finding that they had a lot in common (no foolin'!), and prevailed on their respective fathers to allow this unconventional family portrait. On-screen interviews come from folks like Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, Hailey Mills, Angela Lansbury, Stephen Schwartz, Sheldon Harnick, Tony Walton, Roy Disney, and quite a few appearances by Ben Stiller. (Why Ben Stiller? Turns out he's one of the executive producers.)

So, here for the holidays is a family film from Disney, but not the sort of Disney holiday family film you might expect.

(Steven Suskin is author of the recently released Updated and Expanded Fourth Edition of "Show Tunes" as well as "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations," "Second Act Trouble," and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He also writes Playbill.com's popular Shelf Life and On the Record columns. He can be reached at Ssuskin@aol.com.)

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