In 1953, stage producer
Leland Hayward had the idea to create a 90-minute TV series, a series of color spectaculars to be broadcast monthly on
NBC. Hayward was represented by Saul Jaffe of the
Madison Avenue law firm Jaffe & Jaffe; Henry Jaffe, the firm's senior partner, was national counsel for the
American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, an organization he helped found. When illness forced Hayward to withdraw from the project, NBC partnered with Showcase Productions, an independent production company created by Henry and Saul Jaffe to produce the series. ''Producers' Showcase'' went on the air October 18, 1954. The ambitious series presented a total of 37 live color programs, which included original musicals or plays, restaging of Broadway productions, great concert artists, and tribute programs. ''Producers' Showcase
presented the first international show with live remote locations (Wide Wide World), and the first full-length Broadway production on color television (Peter Pan''). "''Producers' Showcase
has undoubtedly been a tremendous prestige presentation by the network with elaborate and worthy cultural productions," The New York Times'' published in 1957, the series' final year. ''Producers' Showcase'' received seven Emmy Awards, including the 1956 award for Best Dramatic Series.
Premiere episode Director
Otto Preminger was invited to produce and direct
Tonight at 8.30, a trio of one-act plays by
Noël Coward, for the series premiere.
Red Peppers,
Still Life, and
Shadow Play were three of 10 plays comprising a cycle the playwright had written to be performed on stage over the course of three evenings, and under this umbrella title they were presented on ''Producers' Showcase''. The cast included
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. From the beginning, the director obviously 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. Sinatra, who plays a warbling version of the stage manager and clocks the most screen time, scored a major chart hit with the original song "
Love and Marriage," which received an
Emmy Award. The songs were written by
Jimmy van Heusen and
Sammy Cahn in the first of their many collaborations. • In her television debut, although she was now too old for the role,
Katharine Cornell recreated her original stage role as
Elizabeth Barrett Browning in
The Barretts of Wimpole Street, with
Anthony Quayle as
Robert Browning. • Husband and wife
Hume Cronyn and
Jessica Tandy reprised the roles they had played in the Broadway production of
The Fourposter. •
Ruth Hussey,
Paulette Goddard, and
Mary Boland were cast in the acerbic comedy
The Women. Hussey and Goddard played different characters in the
1939 MGM film; Boland reprised her role as the Countess deLave.
Additional productions • The
ballets
The Sleeping Beauty (by
Tchaikovsky) and
Cinderella (by
Prokofiev), both with
Margot Fonteyn and
Michael Somes marked the first time these two ballets had ever been broadcast on television. • A staging of
Sidney Howard's 1934 adaptation of the 1929
Sinclair Lewis novel Dodsworth, starring
Fredric March,
Claire Trevor and
Geraldine Fitzgerald •
The Skin of Our Teeth with
Helen Hayes and Mary Martin •
Cyrano de Bergerac, with
José Ferrer (recreating his award-winning stage and film role),
Claire Bloom, and
Christopher Plummer (a future Cyrano himself) •
The Great Sebastians, directed by
Franklin J. Schaffner with
Lynn Fontanne,
Alfred Lunt and
Alan Furlan, was set in 1948 in Communist-controlled Prague, Czechoslovakia. A mind-reading act is commanded by the authorities to entertain at a private party. They discover what the authorities really want is for them to use their "powers" to expose spies and traitors to the regime. Realizing the kind of trouble they are in for, they decide to escape using their best stage tricks. •
Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet, with Claire Bloom, John Neville, and
Paul Rogers •
Festival of Music, two 90-minute programs, were devoted to classical music, featuring such performers as
Jan Peerce,
Arthur Rubinstein,
Roberta Peters,
Andrés Segovia,
Jussi Björling, tenor
Thomas Hayward,
Boris Christoff,
Isaac Stern,
Leonard Warren,
Zinka Milanov,
Risë 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
Verdi's
Otello) were appearing on commercial American network television for the first time. The programs were hosted respectively by
Charles Laughton and José Ferrer. • The final episode, "Festival of Magic", featured
Ernie Kovacs playing host to
magicians from the United States, England, South Africa, Ireland, India, France, and China.
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 United States, 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. ==Episodes==