On 3 March, the
Broadway première of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Cinderella opened at the Broadway Theatre near 53rd Street. Over the years, there have been several
stagings of the fantasy musical, including a holiday pantomime version at the
London Coliseum in December 1958, the play’s first live staging, and a version
presented by the New York City Opera in 1993, 1995, and 2003. The U.S. premières of the musical were at the
St. Louis Municipal Opera and
the Kansas City Starlight Theatre in August and September 1961. All of these, however, were altered from the
original version written and composed by Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard
Rodgers for live color television broadcast by the Columbia Broadcasting System
on the night of Sunday, 31 March 1957.
Auspiciously, the performance was on the exact same date on which the
team’s Oklahoma!, their first
collaboration, had opened in 1943, 14 years before. Subsequent telecasts (1965, again on CBS, and
1997 on ABC) were also changed, including adding songs from other Rodgers
scores. (The current Broadway première
has replaced Hammerstein’s book with a new one by Douglas Carter Beane.) But I saw the live performance, the only
musical the great team of Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote expressly for TV. (The team also wrote one musical for film:
1945’s State Fair; remade in 1962 and
produced on stage in 1996.) Librettist
and lyricist Hammerstein (b. 1895) died in 1960, and Rodgers (b. 1902), the
composer, died in 1979.
I’m going to try to recreate my response to that long-ago
broadcast, which I watched with my family in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on the set
in our den. But let me make two relevant
points at the outset. First, I was just
10 years old when the show was aired, though I had already seen a fair amount
of theater, especially musicals, by that age.
I’d been going to plays with my parents for a number of years by then,
including pre- and post-Broadway tours that came to Washington’s National
Theatre and my first Broadway productions in New York City the year before, one
of which was My Fair Lady (1956-62) which
had made a star and a national phenomenon of Julie Andrews, the original Cinderella
on TV, the actress for whom R&H had written the role. Second, I’m working from a memory, firmly
held I grant you, that’s 56 years old. I
didn’t keep a diary or make any notes of that experience, though my dad did buy
the album which I still have. (The cast
album was recorded by CBS Masterworks on 18 March 1957, almost two weeks before the broadcast. Because we didn’t have a stereo system in
1957, my copy is monaural, released on 25 March, though a stereophonic version
was issued the following year.)
This is going to come, if it does at all, from my poor old mind (such as
it is). I can’t promise anything, but
I’m going to give it a go. First a
little background, both historical and personal, however.
Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s Cinderella is part of a
continuum of the marriage of television and theater, though it’s a step that’s
never been duplicated precisely. Commercial
television began in 1941 on the station that would become WNBC in New York, but
experimental broadcasts of television plays started in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1928, The Queen's Messenger by J.
Hartley Manners (which had débuted in London in 1899) was the first play aired
(with sound broadcast over the radio), and the first teleplay, The Adventure
of the Three Garridebs (a Sherlock Holmes mystery), was broadcast on the National
Broadcasting Company network in 1937. In 1939, The Donovan Affair by Owen
Davis (Broadway, 1926) became TV’s first full-hour play, televised over NBC's
experimental station in New York City. In the ’50s, television adaptations of
musicals (and straight plays) were broadcast fairly often, including 90-minute versions
of Anything Goes (Colgate
Comedy Hour on NBC, 1954), Annie Get Your Gun (NBC, 1957), Wonderful Town (CBS, 1958), and Kiss Me Kate (Hallmark Hall of Fame on NBC, 1958).
The first broadcast of a Broadway play on television was the
musical Peter Pan starring Mary Martin (which I also watched, at age 8—I
already knew who Martin was from my father’s cast albums of such shows as South Pacific ). NBC aired Peter
Pan in 1955 (in color, although few commercially-available sets could
receive color broadcasts; we didn’t have one until more than a decade later).
Television, which was live like stage productions until the 1960s, continued to
present plays, including established scripts such as No Time for Sergeants (ABC,
1955), in which Andy Griffith reprised his stage role, and Ibsen’s Doll’s
House starring Julie Harris and Christopher Plummer with a stellar
supporting cast (NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame, 1959). Also presented were original plays written
expressly for television by writers such as Rod Serling (Requiem for a
Heavyweight, 1957), Gore Vidal (Visit to a Small Planet, 1960), and
Paddy Chayefsky (Marty and The Bachelor Party, 1953). By the time videotape and film became the media
for creating television programs, live drama largely disappeared from the home screen,
replaced by the made-for-television (and later -cable) movie. As far as I know, CBS’s 1957 broadcast of Cinderella is the only original
Broadway-style musical ever written for TV—not counting several musical series
such as The Monkees in the ’60s and The Partridge Family in the ’70s, Cop Rock in 1990, and now Smash.
(Other musical shows, such as 2007’s Viva Laughlin on CBS
and the current Glee on
Fox haven’t focused on
original songs.) Though public television broadcasters still
present plays, both originals and standards, commercial networks have only
occasionally returned to theater for material: Once Upon a Mattress
(CBS, 1964; NBC, 1972; ABC, 2005), Wedding Band (ABC, 1973), 6 Rms
Riv Vu (CBS, 1974), Gypsy (CBS, 1993), The Piano Lesson (CBS,
1995), Bye Bye Birdie (ABC, 1995), On Golden Pond (live; CBS,
2001), The Lion in Winter (Showtime, 2003), The Music Man (ABC,
2003).
As I admitted publicly (in “A Broadway Baby,” 22 September 2010), I was being weaned on not just
theater at this early age, but the Broadway musical. My dad had a collection of cast albums which
we listened to all the time when I was growing up and I knew the lyrics to all
the Broadway scores from shows staged long before I was even born. (My parents were both native New Yorkers,
though Mom’s family moved to New Jersey when she was little, and Dad went to
the theater when he could as a boy and a young man. One of his earliest dates with my mom was to
the original production of Oklahoma!
before he went overseas during World War II.)
I started with such fare as Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and H.M.S.
Pinafore, which I saw in presentations by the American Savoyards and also
by the famous D’Oyly Carte Opera Company and then moved on to Broadway musicals on
tour. (I did also see some non-musical
theater even at that young age. I
remember a production of Midsummer
Night’s Dream presented at Washington‘s Carter Barron Amphitheater in Rock
Creek Park.) As a result of this early
introduction to the Broadway musical, it has always been a special part of my
life even as my theatrical tastes expanded.
The trade-off has been that I can’t ever shake those first experiences I
had when I see later revivals. For
instance, I suppose it’s not hard to understand that for me, Peter Pan will
always be Mary Martin—but from that presentation, Captain Hook is always Cyril
Ritchard. Well, when it comes to Cinderella, “Ella, the Girl of
the Cinders” (that’s a cross-reference: it’s what Winifred the Woebegone—who,
by the way, is always Imogene Coca, whom I saw on stage, or Carol Burnett, from
TV versions and the album, to me—calls her in Once Upon a Mattress) is
always Julie Andrews.
The TV broadcast of Cinderella
was aired live because virtually all television was in those days. (It took the time slot usually occupied by The Ed Sullivan Show, 8 p.m. Eastern
Time, and the General Electric Theater that
followed it. Sullivan himself was so
enthusiastic about the prospect of an original Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
on television that he promoted the broadcast on his show the week before the
preemption by presenting R&H on the program with Hammerstein reciting the
lyrics of “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?” while Rodgers conducted the
Sullivan Show orchestra.) Cinderella
was also broadcast in color, even though only 150,000 color sets had been sold
that year (out of 41 million homes with TVs then). CBS assembled 245 stations to carry the
broadcast, the largest number ever to air a single program. The broadcast ran an hour-and-a-half with six
commercial breaks. (The sponsors were
Pepsi and Shulton, the makers of Old Spice.)
As I pointed out, my family didn’t have color TV in 1957, so we watched Cinderella in black and white. (In fact, though the musical was telecast
live in color in the Eastern, Central, and Mountain Time Zones, the West Coast
saw a rebroadcast at 8 p.m. Pacific Time in black and white. It was the first time a 90-minute video-taped
program had been telecast.) It made no
difference to any of us because black-and-white was status quo normal in our
house as it was in most American homes at the time, and it wouldn’t have
mattered anyway because it was, after all, Rodgers
and Hammerstein and Julie Andrews. I don’t know about my eight-year-old brother,
but none of the rest of us would have cared.
It was meant to be a one-night-only event, and we were psyched!
Along with Julie Andrews, a slew of musical character actors
co-starred in the broadcast, including husband-and-wife acting team Howard
Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney as the King and Queen, Ilka Chase as the
Stepmother, Kaye Ballard and Alice Ghostley as the stepsisters Portia and Joy,
and Edith (“Edie”) Adams, the wife of comic innovator Ernie Kovacs, as the Godmother. Jon Cypher, who played Prince Charming (renamed Christopher in later versions and
Topher on Broadway), was the only real newcomer in the cast, “discovered by the
authors and producer,” according to the album liner notes by the renowned
George [B.] Dale, who wrote hundreds of CBS Masterworks notes and plot synopses. Andrews (b. 1935), barely 21 years old, took
a break from My Fair Lady, in which she
was already a sensation from her first appearance, having burst onto the Broadway
stage like a stick of dynamite, to rehearse and perform the live show. She had made her Broadway début in The Boy Friend (1954-55). Cypher (b. 1932) went on to star in several
TV series (Knots Landing, 1982-83; Dynasty, 1983-87; Hill Street Blues, 1981-87; Santa
Barbara, 1988-89; Major Dad, 1990-93) and
guest-star on many more.
It was a distinguished company, even though I wouldn’t have
known most of their credits—but I would know their names forever after, and
recognized them every time they appeared somewhere after that. Lindsay (1889-1968) and Stickney (1896–1998)
were both Broadway vets, including a three-year run together in Life with Father (1939-47), written by
Lindsay and Russel Crouse; the pair followed that with Life with Mother (1948-49).
With dozens of credits on the stage, Cinderella
was the couple’s first musical. Chase (1900-78)
was a dramatic actress (and popular quiz-show panelist), having appeared in
over a dozen Broadway plays and scores of movies by the time she did Cinderella. Ballard (b. 1924), who would go on to become
one of my all-time favorite character actresses, had already starred in
Broadway’s The Golden Apple (1954)
and appeared on several variety shows, and Ghostley (1924–2007) had a handful of Broadway credits
and had performed in a number of anthology TV shows, which were then very
popular fare. (Ghostley would go on to
become a beloved character on many TV series, especially Bewitched, on which she appeared from 1966-72, and Ballard was The
Incomparable Rosalie in Broadway’s Carnival!,
1961-63, and then starred opposite Eve Arden, best known as Our Miss Brooks, in
the sitcom The Mothers-in-Law, 1967-69.)
Adams
(1927–2008) had starred on Broadway as Eileen in Wonderful Town (1953-54), the musicalization of My Sister Eileen, and as Daisy Mae in Li’l Abner (1956-58). She also appeared on many variety shows,
including those of Ernie Kovacs, whom she married in 1954 (he died in 1962),
and eventually had her own show. The
director of the live broadcast, Ralph Nelson (1916-87), was experienced as a theater
producer, stage manager, director, performer, and writer with considerable
Broadway credits and as a film and television director, producer, and
actor.
One curiosity about Nelson is that he was married to Celeste
Holm from 1936 to 1939. Holm played the
Fairy Godmother in the 1965 remake of Cinderella. (Another favorite actress of mine because of,
among other roles, Ado Annie in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma!, a performance I only knew
from my dad’s cast album. Holm was a
guest in my parents’ apartment in Germany years after the first Cinderella—and shortly after the second. She and her then-husband, Wesley Addy, had
completed a State Department tour and, as Cultural Attaché at the embassy, my
dad was her official host in Bonn so he and my mother held a reception for
her—but all I knew was Ado Annie is in my
house! I was probably 18 or 19.) In addition to director Nelson, working with
a stage and TV crew of 80, the choreography was by Jonathan Lukas, who oversaw
the dances of the principals and an additional ensemble of 48. The sets (six large pieces) and costumes (115)
were designed by William (1920-2000) and Jean (1921-93) Eckart; the lighting
was conceived by Robert Barry (d. 2006, age 85). Richard Rodgers’s friend Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981) did the
orchestrations of the score, which included just ten songs (in contrast to the
usual 14 to 16 numbers in a standard two-hour stage production) and Alfredo
Antonini (1901-83) conducted the 33-musician orchestra for the performance. The
producer of CBS’s Cinderella was
Richard Lewine (1910–2005), then vice president in charge of color television
at CBS and a longtime Broadway producer, composer, writer, lyricist, and musical
director.
Over 107 million people watched the broadcast, over 24 million households, a number that
represented 60 percent of the U.S. population at the time. (Another 10 million may have watched outside
the U.S., including pre-Castro Cuba.) Jon
Cypher recalls finding the streets of Manhattan deserted when he came out of
the studio that night after the performance.
It would take 132 years of full houses at the Broadway Theatre (1761
seats), home of the Broadway première, to match that figure; I can’t even
imagine how long it would take to make up 66 percent of today’s TV viewers. (Two years earlier, the broadcast of Peter Pan brought in only 65 million
viewers. The Broadway audience for what
was arguably Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most popular hit, Oklahoma!, which played for over five years at the 1710-seat St.
James Theatre, was only 4½ million.) The
broadcast, which cost CBS $376,000 (the
equivalent of about $3 million
today: more than double what a TV production normally cost in the ’50s and four times what producers had spent to
open Oklahoma!), was shown in Alaska, Hawaii (neither of which were yet states),
and Puerto Rico, plus over CBC in Canada. The broadcast, as anyone might have guessed,
was a huge success, with 1958 Emmy
nominations for Julie Andrews as best actress in a single performance and Richard Rodgers
for Best Musical Contribution for Television, though astonishingly, neither
nominee won. (My friend Kirk quipped
later that “even Eric Bentley liked” Julie Andrews! I'm sure that my memory of her Cinderella is
heavily affected by the fact that I was already a fan of hers. I hadn’t seen The Boy Friend, but have seen her performances in MFL; Camelot, 1960-63; and Victor / Victoria, 1995-97.)
Unfortunately, no one thought to preserve the live broadcast
for posterity and no visual recording of it was kept. Videotape, unavailable in color in the
mid-’50s (which is why the West Coast saw the show in black and white), was
just being developed then and wasn’t in wide use, but it was common practice to
make a kinescope of important shows by filming them off of a TV monitor, but no
one made one of Cinderella that March
evening. At the first dress rehearsal on
17 March 1957, however, a black-and-white kinescope was made—color kinescopes
were not practical—more for the use of the director, producer, writing team,
and tech crew in reviewing the final work than for public consumption, viewing
by the cast, or even as a record of the performance. Everyone assumed it had been discarded after
the broadcast. For nearly five decades,
the original live performance of Julie Andrews and the others in the landmark
musical television production of Cinderella
was considered lost forever. In 1965, a color
version was taped with Lesley Ann Warren as Cinderella and a supporting cast of
film and TV actors (and Holm as the Fairy Godmother). This pale, bowdlerized version was aired for several
years and in 1997, the musical was adapted again and taped as a vehicle for
young pop singer Brandy Norwood (with Bernadette Peters as the Stepmother,
Whoopi Goldberg as the Queen, and Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother).
Then in February 2002, entirely by accident, the three reels
of the 16-millimeter rehearsal film were discovered at the Rodgers and
Hammerstein Organization, unviewed for 45 years. They’d been stashed randomly in a closet for
nearly half a century and forgotten. (How
can you forget an R&H musical starring Julie Andrews?) The
film was transferred to videotape and some of the surviving cast such as Julie
Andrews, Kaye Ballard, and Edie Adams, who’d never seen their own creation, got
their first chances to see it either in bootlegged copies or at screenings at
the Museum of Television and Radio in New York.
(The cast hadn’t been permitted to see rehearsal films lest it make them
self-conscious.) Then WNET (Channel 13)
in New York City became the first to air the rediscovered and restored video on
Friday, 3 December 2004, as part of Great
Performances. It went nationwide on PBS
stations on Monday, 13 December. (A DVD
of the black-and-white kinescope was released the following day.) It was only a rehearsal, with almost no
effects—the “magic” that was performed was preceded only by Fourth-of-July
sparklers waved in front of the camera—and the run-through had no breaks. That first run-through was known to the cast
and crew as “the New Haven Opening” because it was intended to resemble the
out-of-town tryout of a legit show, and it was expected to simulate the final
broadcast as closely as possible. (The
rehearsal the week before the telecast was called “the Boston Opening.”) Changes, some of them major, were apparently
made after the filmed run-through and several later rehearsals.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella came about through network competition and because
R&H wanted to explore this new medium with its huge reach. “It was simply a question of finding
something exciting to do and then finding a way to do it,” said Hammerstein to TV Guide. Both men confessed to being TV buffs, watching
avidly from early evening through sign-off.
NBC wanted to follow up on its success with Peter Pan and approached the writer-composer team to write an
original musical play for television, a new idea in contrast to the adaptations
and direct transfers of Broadway musicals to the small screen. Rodgers had composed the Emmy Award-winning
score for NBC’s Victory at Sea, a
World War II documentary series that had aired in 1952 and ’53, and he and his
librettist-lyricist partner were eager to give it a try. They’d long wanted to do a musical version of
the Cinderella story and felt this was the perfect opportunity. “‘Cinderella’ will permit Oscar and me to do
two things we’ve long wanted to do,” Rodgers asserted, “—an original for
television and something that will interest children.” Because the whole idea was new to the team—as
it was to everyone involved—they asked a TV-savvy friend, Richard Lewine, for
advice. Lewine told the two that his
network was also looking for a musical to produce—and what’s more, they had
Julie Andrews under contract. In his
autobiography, Musical Stages (1975),
Rodgers said, “What sold us
immediately was the chance to work with Julie. It was right from the start,” and the
team signed with CBS. Their intent was both
to appeal tochildren, so they remained faithful to the standard fairy
tale, and to engage the adults as well, so the fantasy and magic were played
down for the romance of the tale and the humanity of the characters.
The story on which Hammerstein based his book was fairly
faithful to the popular 17th-century French version, Cendrillon, ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre (Cinderella,
or the Little Glass Slipper), by Charles Perrault (1628-1703). The
book-writer explained that the team “didn’t want to do a freakish version of
‘Cinderella,’ but only a musical adaptation of the story.” As George Dale’s notes say, in Hammerstein’s
rendition, “Cinderella is neither a goody-goody nor a hoyden. She is a girl of intelligence and humor, and
though she may be oppressed by her dismaying relatives, she is never
dispirited.” A perfect description of
Julie Andrews. In an interview at
the time, Hammerstein said, “We want
the kids who see it to recognize the story they know. Children can be very critical on that score. But, of course, their parents will be watching
too, so we have tried to humanize the characters without altering the familiar
plot structure.” I wouldn’t have
known the words at the time, but what charmed this 10-year-old boy was that the
book was witty and, I think, smart. The characters are rendered more
romantically and honestly than like fantasy figures from a child’s fairy tale
so that Edie Adams’s uncommonly young (she wasn’t yet 30) and spunky Godmother
“seems more like a caring relative than a fairy,” as theater professor
Thomas Hischak notes on the PBS website for the rebroadcast. (She’s not actually called a “fairy”
godmother in the ’57 broadcast.) Cinderella
herself displays a poetic turn of mind rather than a girl helped by magic. Chase’s Stepmother and Ghostley’s and
Ballard’s stepsisters, instead of being “vicious antagonists,” became “funny,
self-absorbed brats,” and Cypher’s Prince Charming is “sincere and thoughtful.” In fact, Cypher (who worked on the part with
comic actor Charles Nelson Reilly) acknowledged in an interview on the DVD
that, having had no experience in musical comedy, he played the role
“straight,” “as though I were Brando.”
It worked. As for the
stepsisters, Ballard remarked after she saw the restored kinescope, “I said, ‘Gee, I wasn’t so ugly!’ Oh, it was so insulting, they asked me to play
the ugly stepsister.”
Hammerstein “cast aside the flummery that has cluttered earlier versions,”
but the librettist didn’t simplify the narrative or the production text, and
the 90-minute show was as complicated to present as any Broadway
production. “It takes a year to
write a Broadway show,“ said Hammerstein in Time magazine. “It took me
seven months to write the book and lyrics for Cinderella.” The script was tailored to the demands of
television, so it was carefully divided into six scenes and the songs, dances,
and action were crafted to fit into the format.
Despite this, Rodgers disclosed to the Saturday Review, “we’re doing it
as much like a stage show as possible.” Andrews even recounted later of “the
magical things” that Nelson, the director, “wanted to make it on camera, rather
than using whatever limited technical effects we could have used in those days.” Hammerstein admitted to Time, “Being ignorant of the medium, I
wrote this show on the assumption we could do anything and nothing has been
refused me yet.” Unusually for TV, the show was rehearsed for weeks, starting
on 21 February 1957, just like a stage musical.
In a later comment, the librettist insisted, “It will be good enough to
be seen on the stage, in the movies or even on television again.” (Except for the movies, Hammerstein predicted
correctly, as it turns out.) “I’ve never
been in a show that was so well-rehearsed,” said an actor in the
production. Though R&H were ignorant
of the new medium, both Nelson and Lucas were experienced in working on musical
material for television. The company of
56 actors, 33 musicians, 80 crew members, and four large cameras worked in CBS’s Studio 72, the network’s smallest color space at the time, at 2248 Broadway, the
former RKO 81st Street Theatre (demolished except for its façade in 1986). In the 4,200-square-foot studio, the Eckarts created
a street scene, the exterior and interior of Cinderella's house, a room in the
palace, a ballroom, and a garden. In
a theatrical production, sets can disappear into the wings or up into the flies
when not in use on stage. But for
television, all the sets had to remain throughout the broadcast so the cameras could
catch the scenes in different parts of the studio. With the addition of staircases, the cameras also
had to deal with elevation along with the varying sizes of the rooms. Of course, none of this was obvious to the
audience at home who saw a smooth and continuous performance. Backstage, however, was what resembled a
three-ring circus—“a combination,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization
quips, “of My Favorite Year and A Night at the Opera.”
So, what did all this effort add
up to? In one sense, 60 percent of the
country’s population can’t be all wrong.
If Jon Cypher is right and everyone in Manhattan (and, I assume,
elsewhere) stayed home to watch this once-in-a-lifetime event, it must have
been some phenom, right? Well,
maybe. After all, no one knew what was
going to end up on the box since it was a live show and no one except a few
insiders had seen the “tryouts.” All
those millions of viewers could have been disappointed, as were some reviewers
the next day. On 1 April 1957, New York Times television reviewer Jack Gould caviled that
“last night’s ‘Cinderella’ was wanting in some respects.” Missing, Gould declared, was “that elusive
quality of fragile spirit that makes a fairy tale universally loved.” The Times
writer complained, “The warmth of ageless make-believe was submerged in the
efficiency of the modern touch.” He
called the score “a shade thin and repetitive,” but went on to name four songs
(out of ten) he predicted would “not lack popularity on records and dance
floors.” Gould also had “quibbles” with
Hammerstein’s alterations to the fairy story, in particular the comic treatment
of the stepsisters and stepmother. The
reviewer, pronouncing Jon Cypher “a ‘find,’” had high praise for Andrews,
except that she was “fully as beautiful behind the broom as under the
tiara.” (Cinderella’s costumes also
seemed “much too sophisticated.”) Gould
offered no complaints about Nelson’s direction, especially the camera work in
the magic effects.
In a later article in the New York Times on 7 April, Gould reported, “Judged by both
the formal written critiques and word-of-mouth opinions, [Cinderella] was either unreservedly enjoyed, rather angrily
rejected or generally approved, subject to significant reservations.” Gould’s own assessment was: “As a
girl-meets-boy story it had the heaven-sent blessing of Miss Andrews, who . . .
was a beguiling vision. When she and Jon
Cypher . . . raised their voices in songs . . . it was most pleasant theatre.” His notice’s subtitle, however, made a
different point: “A Pleasant ‘Cinderella’ That lacked the Magic Touch.” He found “fault” with R&H’s “faithfulness
to the spirit of ‘Cinderella,’” which “was very jarring and seriously
destructive of the fairy tale’s precious fragility,” turning, for example, the
stepsisters “into two distasteful vaudeville clowns.” The Times’s
TV reviewer continued that R&H “discarded the element of contrasts which
really is the whole point of make-believe in ‘Cinderella’” by permitting
Andrews “to appear so strikingly lovely and composed as the drab housemaid that
her subsequent transformation into a radiant princess was very nearly
anticlimactic.” Finally, Gould compared
the score of Cinderella unfavorably
with the greatest of R&H’s past Broadway works, asserting that “on first
hearing it seems both reminiscent and derivative of some of their earlier
successes” and dubbing the songs “not top-drawer Rodgers and Hammerstein.” The review-writer praised most of the cast,
but observed that “Kaye Ballard seemed to be under the impression that she was
doing a sketch written for Martha Raye.”
Gould even criticized the “cramped” studio:
“There was excellent dimension in terms of depth, but the limited width of the
playing area marred the big ballroom scene.”
And the writer challenged, “[C]ouldn’t Cinderella have been dressed in a
dreamlike ball gown of fantasy land rather than a chic, form-fitting number
more suited to the Plaza’s Persian Room?”
In fact, the Eckarts designed just such a costume for Andrews, with a
fluffy, lacy skirt right out of a storybook, but Nelson soon saw that the big,
heavy dress wouldn’t be suitable for the cramped studio and the narrow stairs
the star had to descend so it was replaced with a less fussy, more
tightly-fitted, empire-waisted, sleeveless white sheath in which Andrews could
maneuver more easily. (At 10, I didn’t
know diddly about fashion or costume but Andrews’s dresses and all the clothes in
Cinderella looked perfectly magical
to me. Even in black and white.)
Perhaps the harshest critic of the broadcast
was Robert Lewis Shayon of Saturday
Review. He claimed to have
“questioned” viewers of the musical and “of roughly fifty,” he found only two
who’d been “enthralled”: his eight-year-old daughter and a “sweet lady on her
eighties” who loved all television unquestioningly. “In between the young-in-heart ages every
grown-up with whom I chatted,” Shayon alleged, “thought ‘Cinderella’ was a
wonderless bore.” In the Christian Science Monitor, Melvin
Maddocks found, “There was a confusion of styles in Mr. Hammerstein’s book, as
if he were at various times thinking of Viennese operetta, ‘Alice in
Wonderland,’ and perhaps an Andy Hardy romance.”
Variety covered the show
twice. On 1 April 1957, “Kove” (in those
days, Variety reviewers used code
abbreviations for their bylines) allowed that “even if it wasn’t the best thing
the famed team ever have turned out,” the telecast “still stacked up as a fine
evening of theatre.” Kove opined that
“if the score seemed to disappoint,” it was only because so much was expected
of R&H. Cinderella, the reviewer declared, was “a generally fine production”
with a “delightful” book by Hammerstein and “splendid costuming and settings.” The directing “was . . . sprightly, inventive
and marked by excellent use of the camera.”
Kove generally praised the actors, adding that “both Miss Ballard and
Ghostley acquitted themselves admirably.”
Then on 3 April, “Rose” declared that Rodgers and Hammerstein “delivered
a whale of a show” that was “90 minutes of pleasurable viewing.” Rose demurred slightly, saying, “If there was
an occasional lapse when ‘Cinderella’ took itself a mite too seriously . . .,
there was nonetheless artistry of the first order . . . executed for the
most part with finesse and exacting skill.”
Rodgers’s score was “unquestionably the finest original cleffing for tv
yet” and Hammerstein’s lyrics “were clever, yet remained romantic and
sweet.” The review-writer added that
“the songs themselves, even though a few of them might be termed derivative,
made one soon forget the less inspired moments.” Rose praised all the technical aspects of the
broadcast and most of the individual performances, also singling out Ballard
and Ghostley who “brought fine comedic talents to the role of the
stepsisters.” This Variety reviewer concluded, “It was a class show.”
Okay, I was only 10, as I noted, so I didn’t
have the sophistication and background knowledge of Gould and other journalists,
but I didn’t feel any of what the Timesman objected to. Second-rate R&H? Not a bit of it, as the Brits say. I hummed and sang that score for weeks after
seeing the show—I did that in those days: I’d walk out of musicals singing all
the songs. Howard Lindsay’s part in “The Prince Is Giving a
Ball” was hilarious and his refrain became a sort of theme song in my family: “I
want the wine of my country. I want the wine of my country! I want the wine of my country! The wine
of my country is beer!” Kirk, who
never saw the 1957 broadcast, told me after seeing the rebroadcast in 2004 that
he “roared when I heard it.” (It was one
of his funniest lines in the show and was cut from all the remakes—and, I
suspect, the stage versions!) Lindsay’s
King and Stickney’s Queen were wonderfully silly and oblivious, contrasting
their behavior with their natural looks of dignity and warmth. “In My Own Little Corner” and “Impossible/It’s
Possible” also became lifelong favorite tunes of mine. Edie Adams's Godmother-as-cheerleader was
wonderful, twirling her giant magic wand.
She was a decidedly modern (for the 1950s), and young, magical
guardian. Chase, Ghostley, and Ballard
were funny and mean at the same time, the kind of comic bullies who make you
laugh rather than cringe—and who actually redeemed themselves in the end of
this version. The R&H world of Cinderella, as primitive and cheesy as it looks now, was as magical a place as any
computer-generated environment a tech-savvy George Lucas could devise today. I mean, a pumpkin
turned into a golden carriage before
my very eyes! That ain’t chopped liver!! Kirk, a theater composer and playwright
himself, added, “Hammerstein's lyrics are very funny. That's a side of him that I don't think is
sufficiently appreciated.” So much for
substandard R&H! Remember, I already
knew the music from Oklahoma!, South Pacific, Carousel, and the other musicals Gould compared to Cinderella—and they are beloved to
me—but Cinderella never paled before
them to me, and I missed each and every cut and alteration when the play was
remade in ’65 and ’97. (When it comes to
musical theater, I’m a strict constructionist.
No additions, no subtractions!)
As
for Ballard’s Portia, I can’t even remember her clowning beyond the limits of
the character. I don’t remember if I
would have known who Martha Raye was when I was 10—though, of course, I would
learn later (the comedienne had recurring roles in the TV series McMillan and Wife in the ’70s and Alice in the ’80s). I can’t say that Ballard bore any resemblance
to the famously large-mouthed comedian-singer; I only know that from then on Ballard
was a favorite of mine—way before she started doing TV sitcoms. (In Carnival!,
Ballard performed what may be the most outrageous love song ever staged, “Always
Always You.” As The Incomparable Rosalie
sings to the magician with whom she’s in love, Marco the Magnificent, who’s encased
in a wooden box, she thrusts swords into him!)
The slapstick nature of the two stepsisters in the TV musical was
intentional, of course, both to keep the threat-level low for the children the
performance was meant to attract and to add an element of comedy for the
adults—in the same way that Howard Lindsay’s buffoonish king was an appeal to
grown-up humor. As an acting teacher of
mine liked to cite Laurence Olivier, ‘Humor makes more human.’
I wouldn’t really have known some
of this when I saw that original broadcast, of course. I discerned much of it when I watched the PBS
telecast of the rehearsal kinescope back in ’04. I also saw then how skillfully the technical
production was handled, despite the tight quarters of Color Studio 72. I’m not sure why Gould felt it was necessary
to criticize the circumstances of the facilities—it’s not as if R&H could
build their own soundstage—or even get their choice of studio. They got what CBS had available that suited
the needs. Given the state of the
technical arts 56 years ago and the conditions the space dictated, I was
astounded at how well the production actually looked, even in dress rehearsal,
two whole weeks before the broadcast. The
directing alone was a feat—Kirk had seen a stage version of Cinderella before seeing the video of
the TV version and remarked on how difficult it is to do live—“and now I
understand why.” Remember, too, that I
saw the show in black and white, so I didn’t have the spectacle of color to amaze
me, but I was thrilled with what I saw.
Okay, I have no doubt that my
memory of how I reacted back then is heavily colored by both my extreme youth
at the time, my devotion to musicals then, and a great deal of nostalgia. This production could probably not have done
anything wrong in my eyes—but I did watch it again as an adult and it all
pretty much came back to me, colored however it was by my nostalgic
recollection. Maybe, considering that,
first, this is still a fantasy tale, even if R&H wanted to bring it down to
earth some, and it was a fabulous experiment in what was still an infant
medium—commercial television wasn’t a whole lot older than I was—trying to
figure out how to make it all work, having too much knowledge like the TV
critics, reviewers, and journalists who wrote the notices was a detriment. I don’t think Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella made the impression on my
parents, in their 30’s at the time, as
it did on me but I also recall they enjoyed it immensely
at the time. After all, Dad did buy the
cast album—ostensibly for me, I’m sure, but nevertheless . . . . And it was Dad who turned “the wine of my country
is beer” into a family catchphrase. When
I asked Mom about the broadcast the other day, she didn’t really remember even
having watched it. So, it didn’t stick
with her as strongly as it did me.
I've
never felt any of the TV remakes—the 1965 version with Lesley Ann Warren or the
1997 with Brandy—ever came even close to the original live version, however primitive
it might look today. The subsequent
versions all had so little personality—it was all pasteurized and homogenized
with all the quirks and oddities ironed out by the adapters and the directors. At least that’s my impression, biased as it
is. (I saw a bit from the Broadway
production on Letterman early in April and my impression was similar: even
though the actors were all fine performers and singers—Laura Osnes has a beautiful
soprano voice—there seemed to me to be no idiosyncrasies in anyone’s performance
that compared to Edie Adams’s Godmother or Andrews’s young dreamer or Ballard’s
and Ghostley’s stepsisters; they were just nice, accomplished . . . and dull. They sang a medley which led off with
“Impossible”/”It’s Possible,” one of my favorite numbers, and it seemed to have
no character, no charm, just competence.
When Adams and Andrews sang it, at least in my memory, it dazzled and
told its own little story about “all the dreamers in all the world” and “daft
and dewy-eyed dopes.” I guess, at 10, I
was among those.)
The
’65 remake used several stage actors in the cast—Walter Pidgeon (the King), Jo
Van Fleet (the Stepmother), and Celeste Holm most prominently; Warren and Ginger
Rogers (the Queen) had done some stage work but most of their credits had been
in film. (Only Edie Adams's Godmother
wasn't diminished by her later replacement: Celeste Holm, as I admitted, had
always been a special favorite of mine, too, so I can't fault the production
for that recasting. I don’t think Holm,
who died last July at age 95, was capable of ever doing a characterless
performance, even if everything around her was dreck.) By the time the ’97 adaptation was made, most
of the company were principally film and TV actors or, as Brandy and Whitney
Houston were, pop stars. Victor Garber
(the King), Jason Alexander (the Steward), and Bernadette Peters (the
Stepmother) had considerable stage experience but, except for Peters, were best
known from the screen. (Whoopi Goldberg,
the Queen, had done one Broadway musical prior to Cinderella and had appeared in her comedy special on Broadway. Paolo Montalban, the Prince, was appearing in
The King and I when he was cast in Cinderella, but he was an understudy and
it was his début.) I couldn’t see Brandy
as Cinderella. She was too strong a
performer—a modern American teenager of the late 20th century—and too much a
pop singer. The Fairy Godmother has a
little more flexibility, so Houston could get away with it (not that she could
compete with either Adams or Holm!) In
the 1957 cast, everyone including novice Jon Cypher, who’d been doing summer
stock where stage actors cut their teeth in those days, were live-theater vets,
what the New York Times of the day
described as “virtually an all-Broadway cast.”
Julie Andrews, of course, was also the perfect musical ingénue—great for Eliza Doolittle as well. The point I’m getting at here is that back in
the day, TV used experienced stage actors; today, when they get “stars,”
they’re mostly film actors. The
latter may know how to work before a camera, but the former know how to work before an audience. I think that’s the missing piece—the first
version of Cinderella had the dynamic
of a live performance. They weren’t
making movies on TV—they were doing plays. In addition, there was the frisson of being a
total experiment because no one knew yet how the TV business really
worked. The 1957 Cinderella company weren’t breaking rules or pushing the
envelope. They were trying to invent the rules because there weren’t
any yet!
I’m
reminded of the gag about the bumblebee: It’s aerodynamically impossible for it
to fly, but since the bee doesn’t know the laws of aerodynamics, it goes ahead
and flies anyway. TV was like that in
the ’50s. They could do outrageous
and—if you will—impossible things because no one knew any better. By the time 1965 came around, the TV business
had rules and standards and executives and sponsors who expected mainstream
entertainment—and that’s what they got in the remakes. They took all the silliness, the goofiness,
the quirkiness out—like “I want the wine of my country”—and left the
shadow. Rodgers revealed to a New York Times reporter that they dealt
with “only the people who are actually getting the thing ready for the
air.” During their month or more of
working at the network, the composer said, they’d “had only one smell of
top-echelon brass.” I’ll bet that in ’65
and ’97, there were executive producers and network officials all over
the soundstages for the remakes making sure everyone was toeing the line and
just squeezing the spark right out of the whole proceeding. Apologies to Brandy and Whoopi and Whitney,
but it comes out white bread. Just casting black performers in the roles does not
create pizzazz and snap. Sorry. All the things about which Jack Gould
complained were removed, including the danger that it might all go poof during
the broadcast, and I missed them. I
didn’t know it at the time, of course, but aside from my personal prejudices
going in, I thrilled to the newness, the liveness, the specialness—the
flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants—of this performance, never done before and,
sadly, never tried again. “Nobody
would attempt anything that complex now, I don't think,” commented my friend
Kirk, adding “or know how.” I came away, I remember, feeling elated, a little
light-headed, because I’d been there when this remarkable thing was done and it
was fantastic. The benighted viewer
wasn’t Gould’s eight-year-old daughter (or the 80-year-old woman), but
Gould. He lost something they still had.
When
I watched the 2004 broadcast of the kinescope, much of that elation came back
to me—part memory and part re-experiencing.
I saw all the flaws, exacerbated some by the nature of the kinescope
(which is somewhat distorted for having been filmed from a convex TV
screen—and, of course, it’s a film of a TV image as well), and I still marveled
at what the creators had made. The
performances, 47 years in the can, were as delightful as they’d been when they
were live. As my friend Kirk told me
that his wife, Pat, had mused of Julie Andrews, who glowed in all the reviews
no matter what else the writers had to say, “She's a cut above, isn't
she?” Yeah, definitely “a cut above”!
And doesn’t that say it all?
On Thursday, 15 December 2016, I walked over to the Washington Irving Campus on Irving Place just east of Union Square to see the opening performance of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Cinderella’ presented jointly by the Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School and the Union Square Academy for Health Sciences. The main reason I wanted to see a high school musical was simple: the director was Erin Woodward, oldest daughter of my friend (and frequent ROT contributor) Kirk Woodward. (I’ve known Erin since she was a little girl and have always tried to support her work. For a number of years now Erin has been a teacher of theater and performing arts in the New York City public schools, currently dividing her time between the Union Square Academy--formerly Washington Irving High School--and Chelsea CTE. This is her eighth combined Irving-Chelsea production, of which I’ve now seen three).
ReplyDeleteBut I also had a private motivation to walk across the square that evening. As the post above demonstrates, I have a special feeling for the R&H ‘Cinderella.’ But I said above that I’d never seen any of the stage adaptations of the musical. Well, now I have. And despite the enthusiasm which Erin’s teenaged cast brought to the production, I can’t say I found much to be fond of in Douglas Carter Beane’s new book, written for the 2013 Broadway première.
Oh, the role of the young revolutionary, Jean-Michel (charmingly played at Washington Irving by Jose Lopez) is a nice enough touch as a romantic partner for Stepsister Gabrielle (Tabitha Curcio), but that very plot change makes Gabrielle less a funny spoiled brat than either Kaye Ballard’s Joy or Alice Ghostley’s Portia (the stepsisters’ names changed in every revision, so I have no idea whom Gabrielle replaced) and eliminated another chance for the comedy that had already been diminished with the down-sizing of the role of the king after Howard Lindsay’s original performance. (The part was entirely eliminated in Beane’s version.) I also wasn’t enamored with the introduction of Jean-Michel’s Bernie Sanders-esque socialist political agitating, an attempt, I assume, to make the age-old fairytale seem more contemporary. It was more of a square peg forced into a round hole, as far as I’m concerned: it felt out of place and self-conscious, even in the hands--and vocal chords--of the Chelsea-USA cast, who bought into it pretty avidly (just like their contemporaries did in the recent Democratic primaries).
Now, I have to admit that despite the disappointments in the 2013 adaptation, I sill teared up at several of the old songs and choked back a lump in my throat at one or two scenes that still reminded me of the 1957 original--Thursday night’s performance didn’t let me down on that score. I even found making the Fairy Godmother a Fairy Godparent played by Roman Claudio (who did a nice turn--though, I’m sure he’ll pardon me for saying, he’s no Edie Adams or Celeste Holm) a fine adjustment that worked nicely and made its own bid for shaking hands with the 21st century—non-gender-specific role-assigning.
Claudio did a nice job with "Impossible," one of my all-time fave show songs, as did Willina Wright as Ella with "My Own Little Corner," a beautiful, wistful ballad by which Wright's lovely voice did just right. But having already consigned the 1965 and ’97 TV remakes to the letdown category, I’m going to have to put Beane’s rewrite on the same list. By me, it just doesn’t cut it.
~Rick