Glynis Johns is 100

If I recall correctly, Sondheim described her as having a 'thin, sliver of a voice' which he felt was perfect for the character to sing.

Amazing longevity, I had seen a while back she was one of or maybe the oldest living Oscar nominee but her centenary had totally slipped my mind so a great spot by the post originator.

She has been retired nearly 25 years but she started so young she still had a career of well over 60 years. Clearly a lot of longevity attached to Mary Poppins with Dick Van Dyke still very spritely at approaching 98.

Please forgive and correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that Ms Johns was the first to originate the character of Deseriee and thus the first to sing the song.

It's also my understanding that all the songs were in place and Send In The Clowns was later added as up till this point every character has sung a song, but Deseriee.

Despite all his success, Send In The Clowns was Sondheim's biggest hit, regularly sung by Frank Sinatra and later, Cleo Lane.

The song itself make absolutely no sense. A lot of people outside the theatre world may have heard it on the radio, or know of it, or the tune. Even Frank Sinatra who had a hit with it was quoted as saying something along the lines of he had no idea what it meant!

However, see the show in full and see it in context and the song makes absolute sense and is perfectly placed. In fact it's so perfectly place that for those who though they knew the song, will never look at it in the same way again.

Yeah, in Finishing the Hat Sondheim writes:

"We hired Glynis Johns, perhaps the only major British stage actress not associated with Shakespeare, and to our delighted surprise, she had a small but silvery voice that was musical and smokily pure. (I was a sucker for smoky female sounds, my favorite movie stars being Jean Arthur and Margaret Sullavan, although their voices were husky, whereas Glynis's was on the nasal side.) The song in this scene was supposed to be Fredrik's, since the action is his, the passive reaction being Desiree's, and I started to write one. But by design Desiree had only two songs in the first act, neither one a solo, and none in the second. During rehearsals, Hal called me to say that he thought this scene might be the ideal place for a solo for her and that he had directed it so that the thrust of the action came from her rather than from Fredrik. I went skeptically to see a rehearsal, and he had indeed accomplished what he had promised: the scene was now Desiree's.

I had tailored songs before to the talents and limitations of particular performers ("Everything's Coming Up Roses" for Merman, "The Ladies Who Lunch" for Stritch), so writing one for Glynis was not difficult. Her chief limitation was an inability to sustain a note; the breathiness that I loved was, ironically, her liability as a singer. The solution was to write short breathy phrases for her, which suggested to me that they should be questions rather than statements. Once I'd reached that conclusion, the song wrote effortlessly; I finished the first chorus that evening, played it for Hugh and Hal the following morning, got their approval and wrote the second chorus that night. The song sat so well in Glynis's voice that at the recording session, even though she'd never recorded a song before, she did it perfectly in one take. I've heard it sung since by many fine singers (I'm happy to say), but to me her version is still the most satisfying.

Then again, when it comes to my own songs, I almost always prefer the original to every other stage and recording artist. I use "prefer" because it's a matter of emotion rather than judgment. The first performance of a song I've never heard before, whether my own or someone else's, tends to be not only the definitive one but also the one I want to live with. Deeply moving as Judi Dench's cello-voice performance of this song was in the British Royal National Theatre revival of the show, I'll always hear Glynis's flute. Barbara Cook singing "In Buddy's Eyes" is art-song quality of the highest order, but it's Dorothy Collins, who sang it in Follies, whom I hear when I think of it. Lee Remick was an actress first and a singer second, but her version of "Anyone Can Whistle" is the one I would take to the proverbial desert island. The notion that first love is the best can pertain not just to human relationships.

Why so many fine (and not so fine) singers have recorded "Send in the Clowns" is a mystery to me. Not that I don't think the song is eminently worth singing, but why this ballad of all the ones I've written? [...] The success of "Send in the Clowns" is still a mystery to me."

She had such great comic timing, every line was great. I love the scene around the table at Christmas.