Cinderella Week continues with Manuel on a true event in showbiz history...
How's this for a televised live event: on March 31st 1957, more than 107 million people watched Rodgers & Hammerstein's written-for-television musical Cinderella starring none other than not-yet-household name Julie Andrews. Critics and networks have bemoaned the increasingly fractured TV landscape and when you look at numbers like that (aided, of course by novelty as well as lack of choice) you can't help but marvel at what that must have felt like. Think of the snarky tweets and memes 107 million people could have come up with! This is, of course, what NBC has been trying to accomplish with its musical events (kickstarted not coincidentally with another Julie Andrews vehicle and followed, oddly enough, with the production that gave CBS the idea in the late 50s to produce a new musical for a Sunday night broadcast).
But let's leave ratings and metrics aside and focus on the opportunity to see a pre-Mary Poppins Julie Andrews light up the screen. It’d be seven more years before Andrews’ Oscar-winning role and by 1957 she was more of a stage actress. Ever the pro, Andrews starred in Cinderella while performing on Broadway as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, a role she’d nabbed right after starring in The Boy Friend after its London transfer. Watching her take on Cinderella is almost like a catching a brief glimpse of everything that could and would be. Her saccharine naivete, both knowing and earnest, which marks both her later Mary and Maria is already here, matched to those glorious vocal chords. It makes Jack Warner's infamous decision to cast Audrey Hepburn over Andrews all the more galling (if understandable from a bankability perspective). But really, this Cinderella is all about Andrews. Indeed, just as Rodgers & Hammerstein agreed to write the show mostly because they wanted to work with her, she remains the preeminent reason to watch the (black and white) version of the telecast that survives: originally broadcast in color as well as in black & white for the east coast, only the black and white kinescope copies remain.
Cinderella, as Tim noted in reference to Disney’s animated version, is a story that one has to approach somewhat tentatively. Prod at it too much and its heteronormativity and entrenched gender roles begin to grate. It explains why productions tend to dazzle you with such fol-de-rol and fiddle-dee-dee, as it wanting to tart up the material lest you examine it closely. In this case, we have the gorgeous costumes (and headpieces!) by Jean Eckart. I’d be tempted to ask what makes Cinderella such a costume designer’s dream but I then the plot hinges on a makeover and a pair of glass slippers!
The telecast is overall a mixed success; Andrews’ vocals soar (watch her take on “In My Own Little Corner” below) and Kaye Ballard, Alice Ghostley (as Cinderella’s stepsisters), Ilka Chase (as her stepmother) and Edie Adams (as her head cheerleader fairy godmother; seriously why does she have a baton for a wand?) infuse the show with a needed wry sense of humor, but Jon Cypher pretty much stops the show on its tracks whenever his prince appears. Wooden and uncomfortable, it’s a surprise Andrews manages to sing convincingly their “Falling in Love With You” number. Overall, you get a sense this is a show conceived for the 4:3 screen that houses it. The ball, which is supposed to feel sumptuous and grandiose feels rather small and cramped while the character dynamics feel as two-dimensional as the clocktower that hovers over the ball. There really isn't much conflict here, though I guess that's already present in the original material.
The stepsisters put it best. Much like Cinderella herself, this iteration of Perrault’s fairy tale is “a frothy little bubble with a frilly sort of air,” effervescent and rather short and slight, if enjoyable nonetheless.