For one, any number of Broadway performers--actors, dancers,
singers--appeared in early television broadcasts. Many vaudeville performers, too, became a part
of early TV.
Yet the television/theatre
kinship went beyond the participation of Broadway and vaudeville entertainers. Early television offered (for the most part)
live performances, live telecasts, and did so in a broad fashion: there were dramas, variety programs, comedy, music-oriented
shows, talent shows, quiz and audience participation programs, operas. Such programs gave, to much
of early TV, a generalized theatrical sense.
Yet it was a new theatrical variant:
live performance seen in the home (or, perhaps, the nearby tavern, where
television sets were often a staple).
As if to underscore the theatrical linkage, various early TV
programs originated from theatres. In 1949 and 1950, for example, Kay Kyser's TV program on NBC (on which my mother
was featured) was telecast from New York's International Theatre, at Columbus
Circle. Beginning in early 1950, Sid Caesar's
Your Show of Shows was also telecast from the theatre, as, for a time--starting
in the fall of 1950--were Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin's Colgate Comedy Hour broadcasts.
In 1950, too, NBC began broadcasting TV programs from New York's Center Theatre, at Rockefeller Center.
In 1950, too, NBC began broadcasting TV programs from New York's Center Theatre, at Rockefeller Center.
One of the programs originating from the theatre was 1951's The
Freddy Martin Show (the subject of a recent post in this
space). For most of its early seasons on NBC-TV, Your Hit Parade--which came to television in 1950--was also
telecast from the Center Theatre. (For part of the 1951-1952 season, the
program originated from NBC's Studio-8H, at 30 Rockefeller Center.) NBC's Four Star Revue, which featured
rotating hosts (originally Ed Wynn, Danny Thomas, Jack Carson and Jimmy Durante), was another program telecast
from the theatre.
(Both venues--The International Theatre, and The Center
Theatre--were torn down in 1954.)
Seen here is a postcard of the Center Theatre (a photo, one notes, which
has the look of having been at least partially colorized).
The front of the postcard refers to the theatre's role as a television
facility--"N.B.C. Television Theatre," the postcard reads--yet the image
appears to predate the period
during which NBC television productions were housed there. To the left of the
picture, at the bottom of the marquee, one can make out, faintly, what looks like
the words "Hats Off." "Hats
Off to Ice," a live ice show co-produced by the skater Sonja Henie, was
seen at the theatre from 1944 to 1946.)
There is also this, about one of the NBC shows which came
from the Center Theatre: The Four Star
Revue provided audience members with programs/playbills about the telecasts;
the playbills, indeed, offered emphasis to the television/theatre relationship.
Shown here, too, is part of a four-page program from the October 4,
1950 premiere of the show, hosted by Ed Wynn.
The inside pages list the show's primary staff members, as well as
providing details about the telecast's
"Scenes," and the performers appearing in them. The back page of the program (not shown here) provided a
lengthy list of behind-the-scenes personnel.
Incidentally, a well-known early 1950s radio variety show, NBC's
The Big Show, starring Tallulah Bankhead, was also broadcast from The Center
Theatre. The radio program, ninety minutes long, featured, each week, a roster of prominent guest stars. The show was heard from November of 1950 (at a time when radio, due to the rise of television, had begun its decline), until
April of 1952.
The radio program, Wikipedia notes (an observation I cited
in a previous post about the show), "is remembered as one of the great
final stands, at its best, of classic American old-time radio..."
I'll write more about The Big Show--more precisely, about a
forthcoming book about the show, by Martin Grams, Jr.--in an upcoming post.
