Monday, Mar. 25, 1957

Rear View

A cream-and-black Cadillac sedan pulled up before CBS's Manhattan studio 72 in an old Broadway and 81st Street movie house and deposited a greying man whose Connecticut license plates read: DICR. A guard nonchalantly nodded him through, and inside, Songwriter Dick Rodgers was greeted by his longtime mate in music, Oscar Hammerstein II. Unobtrusively, they paced the outer fringes of a noisy, cluttered stage, paused beneath a blackboard reading CINDERELLA RUN-THROUGH--FULL CAST. "This is no-script day," said Hammerstein. There were 21 days left to turn the scullery maid of an idea--a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical version of Cinderella--into the glittering color spectacular CBS promises to deliver live to the TV audience on Sunday, March 31, from 8 to 9:30 p.m.

While a few performers struggled over a balky bit of dialogue, the rest of the cast, chorus and crew quit rehearsal for a break. Cigarettes glowed. Wax paper from sandwiches rustled on bare metal chairs. A percolator murmured on a hot plate next to a pile of coffee-stained script books. Six white mice napped in a bird cage in the temporary quiet of Cinderella's kitchen. "They've grown so fast during rehearsal," a prop man said, "that we'll have to get new ones for the show." A bruised plaster pumpkin sat in front of flat No. 15A, and behind it a disheveled stagehand snoozed. Two workmen sipped tea on the set of the King and Queen's dressing room, while in the orchestra area the King and Queen (Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney) munched sandwiches. On the far corner of the stage, Director Ralph (Requiem for a Heavyweight) Nelson went to his knees and with his hands simulated a TV camera. "Come ahead on the stroke of one," he instructed Julie Andrews, cast as TV's Cinderella. "Now Cinderella heads right out of the camera and--"

"Collapses!" groaned tired Julie. She folded onto a chair for a breather.

"Now," Nelson asked, "any problems other than impossible ones?"

Said Costume Designer Jean Eckart: "Where do you want your camellia, Julie, up here in the bosom or down there in the pocket?"

"You know how much bulge I have up here already," replied Actress Andrews, laughing.

Think While Waiting. Julie's manager followed her around the set like a mother bear, calling her "Muggins" and warning bystanders not to talk with her. Julie's 30-hour TV week had to be specially adjusted to her eight performances of My

Fair Lady. "There's so little time to learn my lines," she explained. "I think about them while waiting for cues in Lady."

Gangly male dancers in khaki and open shirts and lithe young girls in flower prints and leotards lounged in motley array on a dirty yellow staircase. Two carpenters surveyed a set of flimsy stairs for the opening production number, The Prince Is Giving a Ball. "It'll never hold the way it is," said one. "Better put a brace under it." Through ganglia of cables down from a remote eyrie came the cry of an electrician: "The damn lights haven't any numbers on them." A large reflector crashed to the floor. "It's the only CBS color studio outside of Hollywood," said a stagehand between bites on a sandwich. "Those RCA color cameras--four of them--they weigh 500 lbs. apiece and are handled by one to four men. We take weight lifters and make cameramen out of them."

Confused While Romping. "O.K., cast," bellowed the stage manager. "Positions, please, for the waltz." Dancers scurried into place under the warm floodlights. Choreographer Jonathan Lucas scampered up a ladder and called: "Pretty faces now; pretty figures, too. Do not bump the Queen, do not bump the Prince and, above all, do NOT bump Cinderella." As Cinderella and her Prince, played by Jon Cypher, a rangy (6 ft. 2 in.) young (25) newcomer from Brooklyn, moved through the dancers, Director Nelson followed closely, again imitating a camera. It was a confused yet sightly romp.

The cluttered set compressed cast and crew like a too-tight corset. Some six basic sets, including Graustarkian streets, bridges, gardens and flats on casters and hundreds of props were arranged in a tight circle on a stage about the size of a basketball court. Off in one niche among the sets, Comedienne Alice Ghostley, one of the mean stepsisters, inadvertently pulled a lavender drape down about her head. "Who in hell moved the curtains?" the prop man screeched from across the room. The sets towered up to within an inch of the overhead pipes and lights. "The street scene is this shape because the studio is this shape." said Designer Bill Eckart. He was worried: "I don't know what we'll do about Cinderella's coach and horses. I guess we'll have to film them, because everyone here is afraid of horses."

The Best One. Out on the floor Cypher and Andrews went through the words of their big love song.

Do I love you because you're beautiful? Or are you beautiful because I love you? Am I making believe I see in you A girl too lovely to Be really true?*

Tunesmith Rodgers listened from the sidelines, confided: "That's the one I like best." Like the other 13 selections composed for the show, the Rodgers tunes were light and a little thin, the Hammerstein lyrics were a little too sugary. There was still time to lace them with some tartness. "But after all," commented the other stepsister, Kaye Ballard, with a shrug of resignation, "it is Cinderella."

At song's end, Director Nelson called the cast round him: "O.K., this afternoon was more struggle-through than run-through. You must watch your cues; we are doing a huge show. With 51 in the cast, an orchestra of 33, and 80 technicians and stagehands, you can see the importance of being disciplined. Know your position before the final confusion."

Neither Rodgers nor Hammerstein, venturing TV for the first time after their triumphant Broadway travels, seemed to fear that the end would be confusion. They presided over the production as if it were another Broadway show. (Their budget: $375,000, four times what they had to stage Oklahoma! Their take: $100,000.) "You have to be damn careful with TV," said Rodgers. "If you're not--it's murder. One mistake, and 60 million people see it. Someone figured that if this show played the Morosco Theater it would have to run 107 years to get the same audience."

"Still," replied Ilka Chase (the cruel stepmother), "it's a shame to spend so much time for just one 1 1/2-hour show." Said Edith (Daisy Mae) Adams, the Fairy Godmother: "Why, Ed Sullivan has just one full rehearsal and you NEVER know-where you are." She twirled a baton--"Gotta get in shape with my magic wand" --then skipped off to sing her one number, Impossible ("for a plain yellow pumpkin to become a golden carriage, for a plain country bumpkin and a prince to join in marriage").

Peering serenely at the clutter, Lyricist Hammerstein found the demands of TV tolerable. "It took me seven months to write the lyrics and book for Cinderella. It takes a year to write a Broadway show. We plan a full run-through Sunday, and we'll make a black and white Kinescope. That's our New Haven opening. One week before the show and we'll make another Kine. That's Boston. TV's easier than theater because it's very intimate, very fluid. You have dissolves, quick cuts and no exit problems. Being ignorant of the medium. I wrote this show on the assumption we could do anything, and nothing has been refused me yet.

"We knew it was a story everyone loves," said Hammerstein. "We only needed justification to retell it. Putting it to music provided that justification."

Just then a pained cry floated out of the plywood-and-canvas palace garden. "Oh God, Julie, your foot's too big; that damn glass slipper fits everyone in the cast!"

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