Shelly Goldstein tipped me off about this wonderful video. It's 24 minutes of clips from The Ed Sullivan Show featuring Julie Andrews doing numbers from My Fair Lady and Camelot.
The Camelot scenes are especially interesting. These may be the only filmed records of those performances since neither Richard Burton nor Ms. Andrews were in the movie. More important is what The Ed Sullivan Show meant to Camelot. I explained it at some length in this post but if you don't feel like clicking and reading, at least skim this excerpt from that post…
Camelot, sets and all, opened on Broadway on December 3, 1960. If unknowns had been behind it, it might not have lasted a week. But the reps of Lerner, Loewe and Hart had sold enough advance tickets that it was destined to run at least six months, during which two "miracles" (as Lerner called them) occurred. One was that [Director Moss] Hart, released from that Toronto hospital, came to see it and helped Lerner to do a significant rewrite. Shows rarely change much after they open but in this case, Camelot was said to be substantially improved. This is the version performed ever since.
Then came the second miracle: Ed Sullivan, who then had the most popular show on TV, devoted an entire program to the works of Lerner and Loewe. (This miracle may have been aided by the fact that the show was on CBS, and CBS had financed Camelot.) At the time, current Broadway shows rarely "gave away" their best moments on television, on the theory that audiences wouldn't pay after experiencing them for free. Camelot had nothing to lose so they did all the best songs on the Sullivan show and the next morning, the box office finally had a line of ticket buyers befitting a smash hit.
I don't think this video has all the songs from the show that were performed on that telecast; just the ones with Julie Andrews. But everything in this video is, as they say, loverly…
