NBC’s live broadcast of “The Sound of Music” last year drew 22 million viewers. The betting at the network and on Broadway is that Thursday’s live broadcast of “Peter Pan,” starring Allison Williams, is likely to draw even more, giving NBC plenty to crow about.
But one person who won’t be watching is the original Tiger Lily, Sondra Lee. She played the role on Broadway in 1954 and in the 1955 live telecast, which reached 65 million viewers.
“I just can’t bear it,” says Lee, 84, who lives in New York. “I wish them well, but I have such wonderful memories of ours, of Jerry Robbins, his dances, his mind, of Mary and the adorable Cyril.”
Robbins staged the musical, in which Mary Martin was Peter and Cyril Ritchard, a wonderfully campy Captain Hook.
“The only person I’d be fascinated to see is Chris,” Lee says of Christopher Walken, who’ll play Hook. “Because he’s a song-and-dance man and he’s insane. Cyril was silly. Chris will be silly, but also demented.”
TV was in its infancy in 1955, so Lee and the cast of “Peter Pan” didn’t know what they were getting into. Robbins directed the broadcast like the stage show, with a few bows to camera angles; though, as Lee notes, “What did we know about camera angles back then?” The impact of the telecast became apparent the next day, when Lee boarded a train and “a whole bunch of people came up to me on the platform and said, ‘We saw you last night! We saw you last night!’ Honestly, we had no idea how many people would be watching.”
The broadcast went off without a hitch, Lee says, though Ritchard fiddled with his lyrics. “He never could remember them,” she says. “So he’d make them up. He’d say, ‘Strike him in the giblet, and konk him in the biblet!’ ”
Martin, beloved by millions, was a cool customer offstage, she says. “There was no dropping in on Mary’s dressing room,” Lee recalls. “She was the star. You almost never saw her when she wasn’t in costume. She was guarded by her husband, Richard [Halliday]. We used to call him the Black Pearl, because he was menacing. And when Jerry [Robbins] got angry, we called him the Black Crow.”
Lee says that while she won’t be watching the new version, she’s read about it — and she’s not happy the producers have cut Tiger Lily’s big song, “Ugg-a-Wugg.”
It’s been replaced by “True Blood Brothers,” a new song by Amanda Green, whose father, Adolph, wrote many of the show’s original songs with Betty Comden. According to Deadline.com, she “consulted” Native Americans to make sure her song is more authentic than, say, the Land O’Lakes lady.
Lee thinks that’s silly. “There was no such thing as political correctness when we did the show. The song is about word games, and kids play word games all the time . . . People come up to me all the time and say, ‘Ugg-a-Wugg’! They love it. If you have a classic, don’t mess with it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”