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Julie Andrews sings excerpts from the operettas of Sigmund Romberg on The Bell Telephone Hour, aired 12 February 1960 on NBC

The Bell Telephone Hour was a long-running NBC concert series that first originated as a radio broadcast in the 1940s before graduating to television in the late 1950s where it aired semi-regularly right through till 1968. Essentially, an advertising tool for the United States’ largest telephone company, the popular broadcast show pitched for optimal middle-brow appeal with a light arts line-up of “various genres sung and performed by the top talent in their fields, including opera, country and Western, jazz, show tunes, classical and ballet, all tied together by a certain theme” (Hyatt, 180).

This particular episode from February 1960 is an exemplary case-in-point. Titled ‘Portraits in Music’, the hour-long special featured such disparate performances as Victoria de los Angeles and Brian Sullivan singing operatic highlights from Puccini, Nanette Fabray with a themed medley of Broadway show tunes about ’The Changing Ways of Women’ and poet Carl Sandburg reading select passages from Abraham Lincoln’s speeches to the orchestral accompaniment of an Aaron Copland symphony.

Among the extraordinary line-up of talent was our Julie who opened the programme with a medley of excerpts from the popular operettas of Sigmund Romberg. She was originally scheduled to perform this segment alongside theatre baritone and Bell Telephone Hour regular, Earl Wrightson. However, for some unknown reason, possibly illness, Wrightson had to pull out at the eleventh hour and Larry Douglas came in as a sub. Given his lack of rehearsal time and the fact that the show went out ‘live’, Douglas is a bit uncomfortable but, to his credit, he managed to perform his parts of the extended medley without obvious issue.  

The Bell Telephone Hour was one of several television shows that Julie did in late-1959 / early-1960. The young star was on theatrical hiatus at the time following the end of her marathon three-and-a half year run in My Fair Lady in August 1959 and awaiting the start of rehearsals for Camelot in late-1960. In the final months of 1959, Julie made a series of four TV specials in London for the BBC which were broadcast as The Julie Andrews Show. Then in late-January 1960, Julie flew to New York where she taped two TV specials almost back-to-back: The Fabulous Fifties for CBS and The Bell Telephone Hour for NBC (Andrews, 271).

One of the great joys of this particular appearance on The Bell Telephone Hour is the rare opportunity it affords to see and hear the young Julie Andrews perform the kind of musical material which was an integral part of her repertoire in the early years. Today, operetta is a largely marginalised musical form, often viewed as impossibly hackneyed, but it remained a hugely influential touchstone of popular culture right throughout the first half of the twentieth century (Traubner). Julie’s young silvery soprano and upbeat comic performance style made her a perfect match for the sparkling levity of the genre and she frequently performed operetta arias during her years as a juvenile concert and radio star in the UK.

Even as late as 1958, Julie’s status as a popular interpreter of operetta was front-and-centre when she was invited to perform the lead soprano role on RCA’s high-profile studio cast recording of Rudolph Friml’s Rose-Marie opposite famed opera singer, Giorgio Tozzi. That glorious LP and these rare TV excerpts from The Bell Telephone Hour are among the few remaining documents we have of Julie Andrews singing operetta. Listening to these recordings anew sixty years later, we can still marvel at Julie’s consummate prowess for this deceptively simple but musically challenging genre.

References

Andrews, Julie. Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. New York: Hyperion, 2008.

Hyatt, Wesley. Emmy Award Winning Nighttime Television Shows, 1948-2004. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006.

Traubner, Richard. Operetta: A Theatrical History. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1983.

Disclaimer: This is a fan preservation project; it was created for criticism and research, and is completely nonprofit; it falls under the fair use provision of the United States Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. section 107.

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Andrews and Plummer sat next to each other at the center of the long table, their backs to the room. When they spoke, they leaned close to each other, their heads almost touching. 

Gradually, people at other tables started noticing them, shifting forward to see if they could believe their eyes. After all, the last time most of us saw the two of them together, they were climbing over that mountain to freedom.

And 50 years later, damn if they weren’t right here. Safe. And still a family. - Vanity Fair, The Sound of Music’s 50th Anniversary 

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A Practically Perfect Break

Julie Andrews in a reflective moment between takes on the set of Mary Poppins at the Disney Studios in Burbank, Summer 1963.

Julie is wearing the blue and white striped nighttime nursery dress so this would be during filming of either the “Stay Awake” or “Feed the Birds” sequence.

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Julie Andrews

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Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria?

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Julie Andrews Fantasy LPs #10

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you will surely have heard that The Beatles classic 1967 LP, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – described by no less an authority than Rolling Stone magazine as “the most important rock & roll album ever made” – is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary . News outlets around the world from The Guardian to The New York Times to The Sydney Morning Herald, have carried stories about the album and offered fulsome appraisals of its historical significance. The album has even managed to find its way back to the top of the charts, courtesy of a new special anniversary re-release.

Without doubt, an integral part of Sgt. Pepper’s legendary aura is its iconic cover art. Created by Jann Haworth and Peter Blake, the design was an homage to the era’s burgeoning pop art movement with a pyschedelic composite shot of the Fab Four dressed in fluorescent Northern-style brass band uniforms posing in front of a cut-out collage of 57 celebrities. Drawn from across the fields of film, art, sports, politics, science, and philosophy, the famous faces in the collage were all selected on the basis of some significance for The Beatles and/or their cultural milieu. The innovative design won the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover in 1967 and it has been an influential pop cultural landmark ever since.

Indeed, it’s claimed that Sgt Pepper’s is the single most imitated album cover of all time. Starting with Frank Zappa’s early homage the very next year in 1968, the Sgt Pepper’s cover has been cited, recreated and parodied countless times in everything from Mad Magazine and Bloomberg Business to Stars Wars and The Simpsons.

As far as is known, however, Sgt Pepper’s has yet to be given the ultimate tribute: a Julie Andrews makeover…but that is now set to change! So lend me your ears and the Parallel Julieverse will sing you a song about tangerine trees and marmalade skies and Julie in the sky with diamonds…we hope you will enjoy the show!

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the elegant european woman didn’t stay for tea, but the promise of tomorrow hung in the air

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Appreciation post for Julie Andrews: she is pure light.

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Julie Andrews

(Gordon Parks. 1960)

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The hills are alive with the sound of music, with songs they have sung for a thousand years. The hills fill my heart with the sound of music. My heart wants to sing every song it hears. My heart wants to beat like the wings of the birds that rise from the lake to the trees. My heart wants to sigh like a chime that flies from a church on a breeze.

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Julie Andrews and Dudley Moore in “10″

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the sound of music (1965) // call the midwife (2013)

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‘Appy Liza Dooli’le Day from the Parallel Julieverse

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favourite musicals:

The Sound of Music (1965) dir. Robert Wise

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“ I think after 50 years, you deserve your own thoughts.

My own thoughts as you want me to walk up there?

I’m gonna let you walk…

I don’t have a beautiful veil and a beautiful gown but -

You have your memories.

I do. Oh my god.

Do I ever. “

-  Julie Andrews retraces the steps she took when she played the role of Maria.

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Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton (x)

      On Set Mary Poppins (1963)                   Star! (1967)                   Torn Curtain (1965)                   The Sound of Music (1964)