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"Could it be? Yes, it could. Something's coming, something good. . . " Among the new acquisitions, notes Rebecca Paller, "are two really valuable clips. One is from 'The Carol Burnett Show' in 1971 — Carol Burnett, Marilyn Horne and Eileen Farrell singing 'You Could Drive a Person Crazy.' It's a delightful piece. Vicki Lawrence introduces it and talks about Company, which was then on Broadway.

"The other [clip] is from 'The Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson' in 1973. D'Jamin Bartlett sings 'The Miller's Son,' and she and Glynis Johns chat with Carson. Back then, the show originated in New York, and about 20 minutes were devoted to A Little Night Music. Now you occasionally get maybe five minutes at the end of Letterman devoted to a Broadway musical, and the song is usually out of context. I remember seeing [the Bartlett performance] as a kid, and thinking: 'When I grow up, I've got to move to New York.'"

Jane Klain is excited that the new material includes "a 2000 German-made documentary that hasn't been shown in this country. It's an English-language version and has interviews with Sondheim, Milton Babbitt [a composer with whom Sondheim studied] and [conductor] Paul Gemignani. There's never been a full-length [Sondheim] documentary done [in America].

Says Paller, "Jane Klain is a fabulous, fabulous detective. We all do detective work here, but she's fabulous at tracking things down. Even things we don't think exist, she optimistically continues to track down."

Among Sondheim items for which Klain continues to search (for the collection) are "a color version of 'Evening Primrose' and his appearance on a celebrity edition of the game show 'Password,' on which he appeared with Lee Remick [a close friend] and her mother. And there are two things we haven't gotten yet [for the series], but we may get. We hope that there will be two added surprises."

Klain points out that only some Sondheim shows have been made into movies (including "West Side Story," "Gypsy," "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," "A Little Night Music"), while far more have been done for TV: "Company" (in England), "Follies in Concert," "A Little Night Music," "Sweeney Todd," "Sunday in the Park with George," "Into the Woods," "Putting It Together" (for cable) and "Passion."

Incidentally, on March 31, PBS will telecast a live performance of a concert version of Passion, starring Tony winners Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald and Michael Cerveris (from Frederick P. Rose Hall at Time Warner Center).

Concludes Paller, "The final program [in the series] is completely new [for this tribute]. We've added to a lot of the other packages, but the final one is totally new. It's really quite something — 50 years of Sondheim's work on television."

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The salute will be shown at the museums in Manhattan (25 West 52nd Street, 212-621-6800) and Los Angeles (465 North Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, 310-786-1000). New York screenings are Tuesdays-Sundays at 2 PM, and Thursdays at 5 PM; in Los Angeles, they're Wednesdays-Sundays at 2 PM. Dates, titles, lengths and contents follow.

March 18-27, "Early Days," 130 minutes. The program includes a Crista Moore recording of Sondheim's 1952 song "The Two of You," written for (but not used by) the children's TV show, "Kukla, Fran & Ollie." Also: a segment on the 1997 production of Saturday Night; a 1954 episode (written by Sondheim) of the sitcom "Topper," starring Robert Sterling, his wife Anne Jeffreys and Leo G. Carroll; "In an Early Winter," a 1959 Sondheim teleplay, starring Kim Hunter and Pat Hingle; and "Evening Primrose," the 1966 Sondheim-James Goldman musical written for TV, starring Anthony Perkins, Charmain Carr and Dorothy Stickney.

March 29-April 3, (hereafter, the starting dates in L.A. are always a day later than New York), "West Side Story Revisited," 175 minutes. Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence perform the balcony scene in a 1958 sequence from "The Ed Sullivan Show"; a 1958 episode of "Look Up and Live," featuring Kert, Lawrence, Jerome Robbins and Mickey Calin (later Michael Callan); a 1961 episode of "The American Musical Theatre," with Sondheim, Martha Wright and host Earl Wrightson; and the 1985 "Great Performances" episode, "Bernstein Conducts West Side Story."

April 5-10, "Everything's Coming Up Gypsy," 160 minutes. It features home movies made during rehearsals of the original production; Ethel Merman's appearance on a 1965 talk show, hosted by Gypsy Rose Lee; and the 1993 TV version of the Sondheim-Jule Styne-Arthur Laurents musical, starring Bette Midler. Continued...