Producers' Showcase, an Emmy Award-winning American anthology television series, was telecast live during the 1950s in compatible color by NBC. With top talent, the 90-minute episodes, covering a wide variety of genres, aired under the title every fourth Monday at 8pm ET for three seasons, beginning October 18, 1954. The final episode, the last of 37, was broadcast May 27, 1957. Showcase Productions, Inc. packaged and produced the series.

[edit] Premiere production

Director Otto Preminger was in the midst of preparing advertising and promotional events for his upcoming film Carmen Jones when he was invited to produce and direct a trio of one-act plays by Noël Coward for the series premiere. Red Peppers, Still Life, and Fumed Oak were three of ten plays comprising Tonight at 8:30, a cycle the playwright had written to be performed on stage over the course of three evenings, and it was under this umbrella title they would be presented on Producers' Showcase. The cast would include Ginger Rogers, Trevor Howard, Gig Young, Ilka Chase, and Gloria Vanderbilt. Preminger had no experience in television, but he welcomed the opportunity to work in the medium. ^[1]

From the beginning, it was obvious the director was in trouble. He believed a television production was no different from a film and lit the sets and placed the cameras accordingly. He failed to understand that during the actual live broadcast he would be working with a monitor, pushing buttons to signal which camera should be operating. Rogers in particular was nervous about her performance, and Preminger spent a considerable amount of time with her, but basically ignored the rest of the cast. Supporting player Larkin Ford later recalled he felt Preminger had no sense of Coward's work or how it should be played. ^[1]

As the production entered its third week of rehearsals, there still had not been a complete run-through. Three days prior to the broadcast, executive producer Fred Coe decided to take action. He privately fired Preminger and then simply told the cast and crew, "Mr. Preminger will not be with us. I will be with you through the presentation." Although they felt sorry a man of Preminger's stature had been dismissed for incompetence, they were relieved he was gone. When the show aired, Preminger introduced each act in a taped segment, and he received sole credit as producer and director. It proved to be his first and last television venture. ^[1]

[edit] Peter Pan

Mary Martin as Peter Pan, a memorable performance which contributed to the success of the series

One of the most memorable productions of the first season was telecast on March 7, 1955. Peter Pan, a recreation of the 1954 Broadway musical with all its original cast members, including Mary Martin as Peter Pan and Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook, was so highly acclaimed by critics and well-received by viewers, drawing the largest ratings for a single television program up to that time, that the program was restaged live with nearly the same cast in January 1956. A 1960 NBC revival of the production, first broadcast as a Christmas season special, was videotaped and later released on home video. By the time the 1960 version was made, the children had outgrown their roles and had to be replaced, but nearly all of the adult cast remained the same as that of the two earlier productions.

[edit] Other notable appearances

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made their television debuts in a production of The Petrified Forest that also starred Henry Fonda, Jack Warden and Jack Klugman. A 1955 musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Our Town featured Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint and Frank Sinatra, who scored a major chart hit with one of the production's Jimmy Van Heusen tunes, "Love and Marriage" (Sinatra's version would become the theme song to Married... with Children years later). Paul Newman had been a last-minute replacement for James Dean. ^[2] Directed by José Ferrer, husband and wife Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy reprised the roles they had played in the Broadway production of The Fourposter, and Shelley Winters, Paulette Goddard, Ruth Hussey, Mary Astor, Nancy Olson, Mary Boland, and Cathleen Nesbitt were cast in the acerbic comedy The Women by Clare Boothe Luce.

[edit] Additional productions

Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart with director Delbert Mann during rehearsals for The Petrified Forest

• The ballets The Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, both with Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes
• A staging of Sidney Howard's 1934 adaptation of the 1929 Sinclair Lewis novel Dodsworth, starring Fredric March, Claire Trevor and Geraldine Fitzgerald
• Mayerling with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer
• The Skin of Our Teeth with Helen Hayes and Mary Martin
• The Barretts of Wimpole Street with Anthony Quayle as Robert Browning and a slightly overaged Katharine Cornell, recreating her original stage role after 23 years, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Cyrano de Bergerac, with José Ferrer (recreating his award-winning stage and film role), Claire Bloom and Christopher Plummer (a future Cyrano himself)
• The Letter, directed by William Wyler and starring Siobhan McKenna, Michael Rennie, John Mills and Anna May Wong
• Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, with Claire Bloom, John Neville and Paul Rogers
• Festival of Music, two 90-minute programs devoted to classical music, featuring such performers as Jan Peerce, Arthur Rubinstein, Roberta Peters, Andres Segovia, Jussi Bjoerling, Boris Christoff, Isaac Stern, Leonard Warren, Zinka Milanov, Rise Stevens and Renata Tebaldi. Most of these classical artists (except for Roberta Peters, who had appeared on George Jessel's show, and Leonard Warren, who had sung Iago in the historic 1948 first complete telecast of Otello) were appearing on commercial American network television for the first time. The programs were hosted respectively by Charles Laughton and José Ferrer.

[edit] Wide Wide World

Producers' Showcase served as the springboard for the live documentary series Wide Wide World. Conceived by network head Pat Weaver and hosted by Dave Garroway, the show was introduced on Showcase on June 27, 1955. The premiere episode, featuring entertainment from the US, Canada and Mexico, was the first international North American telecast in the history of the medium. It received a regular Sunday afternoon time slot the following October.

The final episode, "Festival of Magic," featured Ernie Kovacs playing host to magicians from the US, England, South Africa, Ireland, India, France and China.

[edit] DVD

The Sleeping Beauty telecast and the Festival of Music programs are, to date, the only Producers' Showcase episodes to have been released officially on DVD, complete with their commercial announcements. The 1955 Peter Pan has been released on an unofficial DVD. However, the DVD's are in black-and-white, not color, since kinescopes could record only in black-and-white, and the visual quality is not up to that of some other early television releases on DVD, such as the Toscanini telecasts.

[edit] Awards and nominations

[edit] Additional reading

• Brooks, Tim and Marsh, Earle, The Complete Dictionary to Prime Time Network TV Shows 1946 - Present. Ballantine Books 1988. ISBN 0-345-35610-1, pp. 639-640

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Producers' Showcase at the Internet Movie Database
• Producers' Showcase at TV.com
• Producersshowcase.org