Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein collaborated to create some of our most memorable musicals, including The Sound of Music, Oklahoma, The King and I, and South Pacific. The pair wrote only one musical for television, Cinderella, in 1957, which came to be known as Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella. They chose to base the book on the Charles Perrault version of the story, Cendrillon. That production featured Julie Andrews in the title role, and was watched by more than 100 million people.
The television musical was remade twice. The first, broadcast in 1965, was stuffed with Old Hollywood names, from Celeste Holm as the Fairy Godmother, to Walter Pidgeon and Ginger Rogers as the King and Queen, with Lesley Ann Warren as Cinderella. The 1997 version also went big, starring R& B vocalist Brandy Norwood as the title character, with Whitney Houston as her Fairy Godmother and Whoopi Goldberg as the Queen.
Several adaptations of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella have played the Broadway stage, from New York City Opera's version to a pantomime version out of London's West End, but the iteration that played in 2013, in which the plot is slightly updated for the modern world, was nominated for nine Tony Awards. The American Theatre Guild's production of this show is on stage at Century II Concert Hall, January 28th through the 30th. Children under the age of five are not permitted to attend, and every person who enters the theatre must have a ticket of his or her own.
