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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 special 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.