STEPHEN SONDHEIM COLLECTION (Image Entertainment)

In one of the best songs ever written, Rodgers and Hart’s "I Wish I Were in Love Again," love is both "the words I’ll love you till the day I die" and also "the self-deception that believes the lie." The truest musical heir to this unsentimental view of relationships is Stephen Sondheim. Often, his characters are too self-absorbed to please anyone else. Sweeney Todd, "the demon barber of Fleet Street," is so bent on revenge he prefers it to Mrs. Lovett, his partner-in-crime (who turns Sweeney’s victims into tasty meat pies). In Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim’s Pulitzer-winning musical about French pointillist Georges Seurat, an obsession with art threatens the artist’s capacity for human contact. Yet in Passion, an infirm older woman’s obsession with a handsome young soldier finally, at the cost of her life, rescues him from his selfishness. "It takes two," the Baker and his Wife realize in Sondheim’s mélange of dark fairy tales, Into the Woods.

All six DVDs in this set are good. The best are Passion, with the magnificent Donna Murphy; Into the Woods, with Bernadette Peters and the Broadway cast; and an abbreviated Follies in Concert, with Lee Remick, Elaine Stritch (singing an unforgettable "Broadway Baby"), Carol Burnett, Mandy Patinkin, the beloved soprano Licia Albanese, and, worth the price of the whole set, Barbara Cook, in a heartbreaking rendition of Sondheim’s greatest torch song: "Losing My Mind."

Sondheim seems most original, most true to life, when he’s transforming familiar musical styles. Is he a cynic? A disillusioned romantic? For me, especially when his songs are in quotation marks, he’s theater’s greatest — and perhaps at the moment its only — realist.