Sundays with Sullivan: The December Edstravaganza
- Dec 7, 2025
- 2 min read
Here is the fifth compilation of Broadway musical performances on The Ed Sullivan Show. As I noted, the show was remarkable for being an archive of Broadway musicals, with performances by the original casts that would otherwise be lost to history. And this first segment demonstrates that overwhelmingly. To give full credit, these videos were compiled by Jim Berg.
I try to post these on the first Sunday of every month. If you miss any, just do a search for the word "Edstravaganza".
Today’s video starts with a remarkable 22 minutes (!) of the 1955 musical Fanny, based on a trilogy of French novels by Marcel Pagnol. The show, with a score by Harold Rome, had a very good run of 888 performances, which is over two years. But it would likely be overlooked by history and have its performances largely lost if not for this extremely long segment. That's because when a movie was made of Fanny, it was done as a dramatic film, with all the songs eliminated except for the title number. Most of the remaining songs were used for their music only in the background as underscoring. As for those performances in the stage musical, they included Florence Henderson (who Sullivan here refers to as “the little Henderson girl”), Ezio Pinza (who had starred in the original production of South Pacific), William Tabbert (who also was in that production of South Pacific, as ‘Lt. Cable’) and Walter Slezak, who won the Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical. The narrator of sorts here is Joshua Logan, who directed and co-wrote the show. And this long sequence includes the famous (and quite wonderful) “reunion” scene that seems to come at the end of the first act. In fact, on a personal note, while I’ve appreciated the score of Fanny, it was never a show or score that stood out for me. But watching this 22-minute sequence, it has such depth and emotion that I never knew was there before – preserved thanks to The Ed Sullivan Show.
This is followed by the long segment of “The Most Happy Fella,” which I’ve posted previously. It cuts off in the middle, and I’ll post the rest next time.
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