What happened was that a strike of some sort against the networks looked very possible. Videotape was new at the time. Normally it would have been done live, but NBC was nervous because of the possible strike. So they decided to shoot it on videotape before the strike might happen. Because the technology was so new, things kept going wrong, and they had to do multiple takes of almost everything. I don't recall having heard or read Alfred Drake express disappointment in the results, but George Schaeffer definitely felt that it suffered from being done on videotape rather than live, just because they'd had to do so many takes of so much of it. He felt that the performers lost spontaneity.
Maybe it would have been better live, but Drake is transcendently great in it. The best male musical comedy performance I've ever seen. |
