Glynis Johns is still Alive at 99! Hear Three Performances of Her Signature Song, the Late Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” from A Little Night Music (Three Videos)

Glynis Johns, when she was young

By Nicholas Stix

Glynis Johns is the only performer I’ve ever heard get this song pitch-perfect. Frank Sinatra was the world’s greatest singer, yet he didn’t get it (he couldn’t sing Sondheim). Judy Collins’ performance is awful. Judi Dench is good, but lacks subtlety. An earlier commenter wrote that Sondheim wrote the song with Johns in mind. It sounds that way.

I wrote the foregoing words six years ago at youtube. Didn’t get a single upvote. Apparently, you’re not permitted to bad-mouth Judy Collins. Collins’ flat-as-a-pancake performance of “Send in the Clowns,” which got her an undeserved Grammy nomination, was one of the things that turned me against a performer who had once been a beloved singer. The other thing was an essay she got published on the new york times op-ed page when the Russian Tea Room shut down, circa 1990. In spie of scriptdoctoring by the times’ editors, Collins’ essay was as flat as her performance of Sondheim. She talked, without wit or intelligence about the famous friends she had spent time with at the overpriced cafe/restaurant. She merely presented a family album to readers whom she left like people on a freezing-cold, Manhattan street watching rich restaurant-goers from the wrong side of massive windows.

A Little Night Music was a Sondheim musical from his peak, when he was writing words and music. It opened in 1973, and was based on the Bergman Top 50 masterpiece, Smiles of a Summer’s Night (1955), before Bergman hit his seemingly eternal mid-life crisis, and lost his sense of humor, about a get-together of petit-bourgeois friends at a country estate on the longest day of the year.

The host, Frederik (Len Cariou, before he got fat), and his old mistress, famous actress Desiree Arnfeldt (Johns), are both there, but they are not lovers. Frederik has fallen to a mid-life crisis, and married a girl who is at most 18, and who is playing him for a fool, refusing to permit him to consummate the marriage (“You Must Meet My Wife”).

I used to see TV commercials for A Little Night Music and think, “I must see that… sometime,” but never did. Next thing it, like so many other shows I’d wanted to see, had closed. Shortly after my August 26, 1985, return from West German exile, I bought the cast album, but lost it a generation ago, having no longer any way to play it.

I also saw Johns in at least two pictures. One was Papa’s Delicate Condition, a Jackie Gleason vehicle, in which Gleason speak-sang “Call Me Irresponsible,” a lovely song which won Cahn and Steyn their fourth Oscar for best Song. However, the picture, which I believe was successful, sounds really stupid, and I can’t recall Johns from it. Gleason plays the richest and most generous man in town who, however, is a drunk (the “delicate condition”).

(“The Great One” had a brief run as a movie star. In 1960, he played the crooked trainer of boxer Anthony Quinn, Requiem for a Heavyweight, with Mickey Rooney, which I found disappointing, in spite of the amazing cast and Rod Serling’s famous script. However, the following year, as Minnesota Fats, he stole the show from star Paul Newman in The Hustler, and in 1963, he starred in Ralph Nelson’s Soldier in the Rain as a hustling, Army supply sergeant and self-described “fat narcissist,” which he turned into one of the most heart-breaking pictures I’ve ever seen. Soldier was written by Blake Edwards and scored by Henry Mancini. Gleason then segued back to TV.)

The only picture I recall Johns from was good, though it bombed. In Henry Koster (who had directed Stewart in the fantasy masterpiece, Harvey, the previous year) and Sheriff and Millard’s No Highway in the Sky (1951), Jimmy Stewart starred as a widowed physics professor who realizes that the plane that he and his brilliant young daughter (whom he home-schools) are on is due to hit its limit on mileage and crack up. The pilot and the airline are convinced that he’s nuts, and put him off the flight.

Meanwhile, two pretty ladies onboard fall for the professor: a stewardess (Johns) and a movie star (Marlene Dietrich, essentially playing herself). The stewardess knows she can’t compete with the glamorous movie star, but the latter, in an act of grace, backs off and lets the younger woman have the professor.

(There was a real-life act of grace involved, on Dietrich’s part. In her autobiography she recounted that while making Destry Rides Again (1939), Stewart had knocked her up, but that when she had told him about it, he simply did a 180, and marched off in silence, leaving her to get an abortion.)




“Glynis Johns and Len Cariou recreate the ‘Send in the Clowns’ scene and song from the end of A Little Night Music. From the laserdisc release of the 1982 broadcast That’s Singing: The Best of Broadway.”

Cast Album Version



Live Stage Version