Rating: B
Dir: Ralph Nelson
Star: Julie Andrews, Jon Cypher, Edith Adams, Kaye Ballard
This TV musical is a product of a totally different era. It was initially written by the masters of the genre, Rodgers and Hammerstein, specifically for television. It was then performed live on CBS, once, in March 1957. The audience was massive: 107 million viewers saw some part of the show, at a time when the entire population of the United States was only 172 million. [The most-watched scripted broadcast in 2024? Under 12 million.] That was it. All the effort – 56 performers, 33 musicians, 80 stagehands/crew – for what was basically a one-night televisual stand. The production was thought lost for decades, until a recording taken off a video monitor, was found in 2002. It’s actually a dress rehearsal, not the live transmission itself, but is more than good enough.
It’s astonishing to think something as complex as this was put on live television back in the fifties. It feels a little like the way we went to the moon on a Guidance Computer with 4 KB RAM and a 32KB hard disk. I’d say it far surpasses more recent efforts in the ‘TV musical’ genre, such as the similarly live and R&H Sound of Music from 2013, or the abomination which was Fox’s Rocky Horror. Pushing the envelope even further, the broadcast was an early use of colour, although one of the four cameras failed during transmission. The surviving copy is only in black and white, so we’re left to fill in the chromatic blanks ourselves, and imagine the impact it would have had on the contemporary audience.
All this technological wizardry would be meaningless, if the performances and material weren’t up to scratch. The latter may not quite be top-tier R&H, but it’s still very good. And as for the former, you simply cannot do better than Andrews. She was the Queen of Broadway at the time, having spent the previous year in My Fair Lady. Her voice is so good, it’s often difficult to believe she is not lip-syncing to a track prerecorded in a studio. The supporting cast around her are mostly excellent too. I was particularly impressed by Adams, who appears to have strayed in from the “Sexy Fairy Godmother” aisle at Party City. She’s kinda hawt. If there were such a thing as a FGILF…
The nearest to a weakness is probably Cypher as the Prince, who is blandly uninteresting. This seems to be a general issue with R&H, though at least he’s not as irritating as Freddy Eynsford-Hill in My Fair Lady. I recommend looking past His Royal Nothingness, and just enjoying the spectacle. As well as, maybe, wondering what was up with people’s eyebrows in the fifties. Because everybody here, including Cinderella, seems to have them drawn on with marker, and possesses a permanently quizzical expression. Otherwise, this is a gorgeous time capsule, dating from a different and largely lost era. One when television was both pushing the boundaries of what was possible, and drawing together the whole nation from a cultural perspective.