Along with their stars, Rodgers and Hammerstein gave a series of high-profile interviews, and appeared in TV featurettes promoting the telecast. In perhaps the biggest PR coup of all, the duo appeared on THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW exactly one week before the CINDERELLA broadcast. There, as Hammerstein recited the lyric, Rodgers lead the Sullivan orchestra in the first broadcast rendition of "Do I love You Because You’re Beautiful?"
Promoting the CINDERELLA songs was of great importance to R&H, since they wanted to be sure that their songs from this score be given as much chance to succeed as had the big hits from their Broadway shows. Rodgers: "It takes time for the public to become accustomed to songs and to like them. If we had to depend on one performance of OKLAHOMA! or SOUTH PACIFIC to put the music across, it would have been pretty tough."
So the team took no chances. In early March, Julie Andrews recorded six songs from CINDERELLA for a special disc that was sent to an extensive list of TV news editors and radio disc jockeys. Another album of four songs from the score, covered by Vic Damone, Peggy King and Paul Weston’s Orchestra, was released exactly four weeks before air date. And finally, on March 19, in the midst of rehearsals, the entire CINDERELLA company dashed over to the Columbia Record Studios to make an original cast album. Produced by the venerable Goddard Lieberson, the CINDERELLA album was in stores on April 1, the morning after the broadcast.
Keeping to their "it’s just like a Broadway musical" mantra, the creative team put the cast and TV crew through several full-length run-throughs that would serve the same purpose as an out-of-town tryout—albeit one without a live audience, but still giving the creatives a chance to see what worked, and what didn’t. Three entire performances were filmed and analyzed; the first two, dubbed "New Haven" and "Boston," lead to some key changes in costuming, wigs, line readings and the repositioning of the opening number. The third filming was a strict record of the hoped-for final product, available to the CBS technicians as back-up if anything went wrong during the live broadcast. (One traditional form of coverage was dismissed by these men with nerves of steel, however: understudies. "If Julie can’t make the show," Rodgers blithely told TV Guide, "then neither can we.")
Finally, it was air date: Sunday, March 31, 1957. Starting at 8PM, CINDERELLA was broadcast live in Eastern, Central and Mountain standard time in both monochrome and compatible color; the West Coast received a delayed broadcast starting at 8PM local time, a videotape format that was transmitted in black and white. Beyond the United States, CINDERELLA was carried by CBS syndicated affiliates in Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and the US territories of Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
The ratings, based on the "Trendex Survey" in use at the time, were astonishing then, and almost incomprehensible today. According to Variety, the 107,000,000 American viewers for CINDERELLA, factored into the number of televisions then known to be in existence, indicated that 24.2 million households were tuned in that night, with an average of 4.43 viewers for each set. Jon Cypher later recalled heading out of Studio 72 on that cold early spring night, a few minutes alter the broadcast had ended, and finding the streets deserted. No one was out; everyone had stayed in, huddled around their TV sets.
CINDERELLA had aired 14 years to the day of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first opening on Broadway, OKLAHOMA!, and the comparative statistics were not lost on the composer; as he later recounted, a Broadway run of CINDERELLA could only have equalled its initial TV audience if it played 8 sold-out performances a week, every week, for 140 years!
A few weeks after the broadcast, Hammerstein revealed to Variety that he and Rodgers were planning on expanding CINDERELLA into a full-fledged Broadway musical. It never came to pass, though the team stayed with the Cinderella theme for their next and final two works: Mei-Li of FLOWER DRUM SONG and Maria of THE SOUND OF MUSIC both make the rags-to-riches journey, and each one finds true love with her personal Prince.
