The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air

This post comes to you through the courtesy of the fact that March 21 is the birthday of Florenz Ziegfeld, and that I happen to be working on a book called Vaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, scheduled for a November release. Researching the book reminded me of something I’d vaguely known about but hadn’t mentioned here on this blog — there was actually a Broadcast version of the Ziegfeld Follies!

There were two iterations of the popular show. The first ran from April 3 to June 26, 1932, quite early in radio history. Broadway giant Eddie Dowling was the host, aided and abetted by the Al Goodman Orchestra. Guests included Ziegfeld stars Helen Morgan,Will Rogers,Fanny Brice (who introduced Baby Snooks on the show), and Jack Pearl (who introduced Baron Munchausen.) Ziegfeld passed away about a month after this version of the show wrapped, which explains the die-out of the original concept immediately following. (The famous bio-pic about the impresario is a little deceptive about his last days. The man was hardly down and out and washed up at the time, it just made a nice story.)

Four years later the show was revived as part of the hoopla surrounding the premiere of the movie The Great Ziegfeld. This version ran February 22 to June 6, 1936, and featured stars like Fanny Brice, James Melton, and Benny Fields. Check it out! You can listen to an episode of it here.

Television made its big debut just a couple of years later at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, but didn’t really get cooking until about a decade after that. Though Ziggy’s widow Billie Burke did revive the Ziegfeld Follies in 1956 and 1957 as a stage show (50th anniversary of the debut), the revival didn’t catch on, and there was no official television version. However, there were a couple of interesting TV echoes of the original to report. Max Liebman, producer of Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar, was known as “the Ziegfeld of Television”, And in 1973, three years after Burke’s death, NBC tried a show called the NBC Follies, hosted by Sammy Davis, Jr. which I wrote about here. This took some chutzpah on NBC part, as the original radio Follies had aired on CBS.

For the full story on Florenz Ziegfeld, go here.

For my post on Ziegfeld in the movies go here.

For more onthe history of vaudeville, Broadway revues and television variety,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.And stay tuned for my next bookVaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023.