‘Shari & Lamb Chop’: A Singular Talent Gets Her Due

I was a PBS-watching child, and one of the shows I loved was “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along,” with a theme song I could still sing for you today and an infinitely earwormy outro, “The Song That Doesn’t End.” (Sorry.) I was a little old for the show when it started airing in 1992 — I watched with my brother, who would have been a toddler around then — but no matter. The mechanics of the puppetry and ventriloquism were entrancing, and they all revolved around a curly-haired woman named Shari Lewis and her puppet friends, especially the lightly sardonic and always funny Lamb Chop.

My mother told me she used to watch Shari and Lamb Chop on TV, too. But it wasn’t till I was older that I realized what a trailblazer Lewis, who died in 1998, had been over her long career. She’s the subject of Lisa D’Apolito’s light and nostalgic new documentary, “Shari & Lamb Chop” (in theaters), which is full of archival footage stretching from Lewis’s early days on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the CBS variety show that provided her big break, through the children’s shows she hosted single-handedly (so to speak) with her puppets from the mid-1950s to 1960s, including “Facts N’ Fun,” “Shariland” and “The Shari Lewis Show.”

The film explores her work in the years after “The Shari Lewis Show” was canceled, including nightclub acts, variety shows, telethons, county fairs and guest turns on various TV shows. And it chronicles her triumphant return to TV in the 1990s with “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along,” as well as her emergence as an advocate for children’s educational television.