Producers' Showcase

- Season 1

(1954)

3 short plays by Noel Coward: "Red Peppers," "Still Life," and "Shadow Play."

A wealthy businessman is persuaded to run for U.S. President. He finds that he is constantly forced to compromise his principles in order to secure support and funding, and finally withdraws from the race. However, his experience has only made him more determined to reform the political system. ;

A tribute to the American reporter.

The story of the quest for freedom in Austria, with an emphasis on music. Highlights include scenes from Beethoven's opera "Fidelio".

The story of US Army doctor Walter Reed and how he and his medical team helped to find the cause of yellow fever, which was responsible for the deaths of thousands every year, in Cuba after the Spanish-American war of 1898.

Claire Boothe Luce's famous all-female play, about a woman whose husband leaves her, and how all her friends endlessly gossip about it and their own problems.

A live restaging of the 1955 TV production of the Broadway musical version.

An archduke who had been banished from Austria returns to Vienna for a reunion of his old fellow aristocrats and meets up with the former love of his life, who is now married to a psychoanalyst.

During the Stalinist purges in Russia in the 1930s, a committed Bolshevik named Bubashov sits in prison, having been betrayed by the cause he fought for, and goes over his life via a series of flashbacks and coded conversations with other condemned prisoners in an adjoining cell.

Gabrielle Maple works in a dusty desert gas station-café, but yearns for the life of an artist in France, knowing there must be something finer than the provincial dead-end she is trapped in. A hitch-hiking writer, the disillusioned Alan Squier, appears and revitalizes her dreams of a better place, and finds his own sense of worth refreshed by this vital young girl. When Duke Mantee and his gang, wanted killers, show up and take hostages, Gabrielle falls in love with the poetic Alan, and Squier begins to see a way to give Gabby the life she deserves.

A wonderful around the world look at the variety of talents and music performances.

Adapted from the prize-winning Broadway play that featured two people and a four-poster bed, in which the couple enacts their marriage, from its day in 1897, until he dies, some time after she has died from cancer. It is a "love" that endured wars, an "other" woman, and the death of their favorite son.

The King of Brandovia is overthrown and exiled. He winds up in America, where he gets a job as a dancing instructor. He falls in love with a commoner, Mrs. Candle, but he doesn't know that his former fiancé from Brandovia has also come to America, with a set of very valuable pearls that he gave her for safekeeping.