[The album] "Side by Side by Sondheim" is a tribute, bouquet, what-have-you to the work of Stephen Sondheim, probably the most gifted and productive creative force now at work in the American lyric theater. It is a collection of songs from an astonishing career that began—at the top—with West Side Story (he was then only twenty-five years old) and has continued on to the recent Pacific Overtures.

The release ["Side by Side"] is a recorded version of the "musical entertainment" first presented at London's Mermaid Theatre last year by three young English performers. In the recent past we've also had original-cast recordings, from that same stage, of evenings devoted to the works of Noël Coward and Cole Porter. If this last go with Sondheim is the least successful of the three, it is so for reasons that have little to do with the quality of...