Alfred Drake

A snobbish investor and a wily street con-artist find their positions reversed as part of a bet by two callous millionaires.

A stage production of Hamlet filmed at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York. It was deliberately staged in the style of a "dress rehearsal", but performed in front of a live audience.

The most glittering, expensive, and exhausting videotaping session in television history took place Friday February 19, 1982 at New York's Radio City Music Hall. The event, for which ticket-buyers paid up to $1,000 a seat (tax-deductible as a contribution to the Actors' Fund) was billed as "The Night of 100 Stars" but, actually, around 230 stars took part. And most of the audience of 5,800 had no idea in advance that they were paying to see a TV taping, complete with long waits for set and costume changes, tape rewinding, and the like. Executive producer Alexander Cohen estimated that the 5,800 Radio City Music Hall seats sold out at prices ranging from $25 to $1,000. The show itself cost about $4 million to produce and was expected to yield around $2 million for the new addition to the Actors Fund retirement home in Englewood, N. J. ABC is reputed to have paid more than $5 million for the television rights.

Broadcast live on the Hallmark Hall of Fame series on NBC, a pair of divorced actors are brought together to participate in a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. Of course, the couple seem to act a great deal like the characters they play, and they must work together when mistaken identities get them mixed up with the mafia.

Rodgers’ friends and colleagues pay tribute to him. Among the original Broadway cast members reprising the songs they introduced are Vivienne Segal (“Bewitched” from “Pal Joey”) and Alfred Drake (“People Will Say We’re in Love” from “Oklahoma!”). Vera Zorina dances “Rodgers in Three Quarter Time,” a ballet created expressly for the show set to three Rodgers waltzes, and Mary Martin sings “Wonderful Guy” as Rodgers himself accompanies her on piano.

Taking place in the Tower of London during the reign of King Henry VIII, this classic Gilbert & Sullivan operetta is one of their darkest and most sophisticated. Colonel Fairfax is wrongly accused of sorcery and sentenced to death within the hour. He hatches a plan to avoid letting his estate fall into the hands of his scheming cousin (incidentally, his accuser) by secretly marrying Elsie Maynard, a strolling singer. She agrees to be blindfolded during the ceremony and expects to be a wealthy widow upon Fairfax's imminent demise, leaving her free to marry her lover, the jester, Jack Point. However, Fairfax miraculously escapes his fate and chaos ensues.

A TV script about a kidnapping inspires a real-life plot.

An American comes to New Orleans to get the help of a governor in catching a pirate, though the pirate in question is actually the governor himself.

The Great Ak calls a council of the Immortals to ask that Santa Claus be given immortality. And to justify it, he tells the history of Santa Claus. The Ak found an abandoned baby and gave it to a lioness and a fairy to raise, who named him Claus. When Claus grew up, the Great Ak showed him the evil and hardship in the world and Claus decides to live there and relieve some of the suffering. He decides to make toys for orphans, but King Awgwa, the ruler of the valley where Claus lives doesn't want the children to be happy, and there is a great battle among Immortals.

Venetian merchant Marco Polo travels to the East and the court of Kublai Khan who makes him an emissary and sends him on diplomatic missions throughout his empire. Over many years, Polo learns new cultures and languages, but he is haunted by the face of a mysterious woman whom he had met before leaving Venice and encounters her face in every woman he sees. Eventually returning to Venice to share his exotic and esoteric knowledge, Marco Polo once again finds the woman of his dreams. The Adventures of Marco Polo was an original, live television musical which was broadcast on NBC on April 14, 1956.

Broadway royalty and Tony-winners Tommy Tune, Carol Channing, Robert Goulet, and Harvey Fierstein are your hosts for this third compilation of great musical performances from the archives of the Tony Award® broadcasts. Legendary stars from legendary shows strut their stuff in 23 performances that have become part of Broadway history.

Biographical portrait of one of Broadway's most brilliant songwriters. Told through the use of archival material and interviews with the rich and famous that knew him, this portrait concentrates on his career and his public life events.

Strange Victory" is about racial bias in post World War II America. Following "Native Land" in Leo Hurwitz' filmography, it uses some of the same techniques: dramatized scenes interspersed with scenes of compilation news reel footage, and scenes of evocative imagery.

Short location-centric documentary.

Howard Young is a coast guardsman who has been on shore duty for three years despite his efforts to be sent into action. His nearest approach to sea duty was on a harbor-moored life raft for 21 days as part of an experiment with a new type of vitamin gum for the government. He meets Christine Bradley, a SPAR, sent to take over his communications job and, by things he leaves unsaid, she thinks his life-raft experience was the result of a ship-wreck at sea.

Harold Russell, an American soldier who lost his hands in a training accident, tells the story of his medical rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC, how he and his fellow amputees at the hospital at first despaired and then found new hope in the prostheses and training available to amputees through the Army's medical corps. Russell learns to wear and to operate the hooks which replace his hands and becomes competent to perform many tasks he had once thought no longer possible. Discharged from the Army, he is welcomed into Boston College by college president William J. Murphy, S.J.

Sally Carter finds escape in the arms of a handsome attorney who arranges her husband's death. It soon becomes apparent that her husband has a life beyond death.