If the Slipper Fits . . .

When it was over, at 9:30 p.m. on March 31, 1957, actor Jon Cypher came out of CBS Color Studio 72 to find New York’s Upper West Side completely deserted--”no people, no cabs; like a post-nuclear disaster.” It was one of those nights when the whole world, it seemed, was glued to the television set.

The event was the debut of a Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical, a witty and sophisticated version of “Cinderella” starring a dewy 22-year-old Julie Andrews, with Cypher as her Prince Charming.

This was a once-only event broadcast live, in color, to most of the country. Here in the West, the audience saw it three hours later, in black-and-white kinescope. In all, CBS estimated, 107 million people watched, the largest TV audience ever to assemble before a single program at the time.

Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to imagine most of the country gathering around the tube to watch a musical, but ABC is riding on the belief that nothing is impossible--a leitmotif, as it happens, in “Cinderella.” With a little help from something TV execs call “event casting”--which in this case means Brandy, Whitney Houston, Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Alexander and Bernadette Peters--ABC is betting $10 million and a lot of talent that lightning will strike twice for the same fairy tale.

This time, “Cinderella” emanates from the West Coast, just one sign of how things have changed since 1957. Another is that the new Cinderella, Brandy, is African American and an 18-year-old hip-hop soul recording star with her own sitcom, “Moesha.” When she learned she got the role, Brandy had to explain to her friends the concept of musical comedy. “My friends think that Judy Garland is an opera singer,” she says.

The musical has traveled far from the days when Rodgers and Hammerstein were at the center of American culture. In 1957, musicals were produced for TV all the time. “Cinderella,” the first and only musical the pair wrote for television, was CBS’ answer to the enormously popular “Peter Pan,” which NBC broadcast live with Mary Martin two years earlier. Today, Wagner might have written “Cinderella,” as far as Brandy’s fans are concerned, but after Nov. 2, that may change.

Understanding that the Brandy “Cinderella” could reach a huge audience, the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization--which keeps careful tabs on its properties--allowed an unprecedented amount of tinkering with both script and score. “Cinderella’s” executive producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who made an unlikely success out of the 1993 TV version of “Gypsy” starring Bette Midler, had the script rewritten to feature a more active Cinderella, one who gets fed up and runs away from her nasty stepfamily. They also added a main character and a half hour to the show.

Their casting is not just rainbow, it’s over the rainbow--the black queen (Goldberg) and white king (Victor Garber), for instance, produce a prince played by Filipino Paolo Montalban. For her part, Cinderella withstands the company of a white stepsister (Veanne Cox) and a black one (Natalie Desselle), both, apparently, birth daughters of the mother played by Bernadette Peters.

But the most dramatic change of all, for anyone who knows the score, is the addition of three songs, including a “new” Rodgers and Hammerstein number that was cobbled together for Whitney Houston, Cinderella’s fairy godmother.

Zadan and Meron wanted Houston to close the show by singing a wedding blessing for Cinderella and her Prince; the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization offered an obscure song called “There’s Music in You,” sung by Mary Martin in the 1953 film “Main Street to Broadway.” The song was close to what was needed, recalls Zadan, but it didn’t build properly for Houston’s trademark vocal pyrotechnics. R&H; agreed that the song could be “Whitney-fied,” as Mary Rodgers, the composer and daughter of Richard Rodgers, puts it. The bridge from another song, “One Foot, Other Foot,” from the 1947 “Allegro,” was inserted, which allowed Houston’s voice to climb to the necessary peaks. To top it off, a little bit of two existing “Cinderella songs--”Impossible” and part of the wedding processional--were sprinkled in, and, voila, Houston closes the show with a big, inspirational number that sounds brand-new.

On the “Cinderella” set at Sony Studios, a photographer has been waiting all day to shoot publicity stills of Houston, and his continued presence is getting to be very expensive. There have been whispered conferences between producers and assistants to try to resolve the crisis, but for right now, Houston is sequestered in her trailer; she hasn’t had a minute to herself all day. Outside the trailer, a gaggle of official Houston caretakers hang. A woman comes scurrying down the lane with a folded-over paper bag she carries with care in two arms. The security guard posted outside the trailer door holds his walkie-talkie and looks hard at her. “It’s Nicole, with the sushi,” says the woman. “It’s Nicole, with the sushi,” says the security guard into the walkie-talkie. “Send her in,” says a female voice from over a P.A. system, and the trailer door opens. Everyone outside continues to wait.

About 20 minutes later, Houston emerges. She is wearing her glittering fairy godmother gown, and on her feet are fuzzy blue slippers. Everyone moves. The limousine is waiting, but Houston opts for the golf cart. Three assistants get in with her, and she’s off, with the limo driving slowly in front of her, for two blocks. Now she is shuttled into the sound stage that contains the wicked stepmother’s house, painted with whimsical gold swirls in the manner of painter Gustave Klimt. The photographer, presumably the one who has been waiting all day, shows no impatience. He coos sweetly to Houston, and she manages to give him some fresh smiles, despite her fatigue.

Afterward, Houston sits for a few moments in a nook of the wicked stepmother’s house. She speaks very softly and sits very still, as if to reserve her last ounce of energy against the last interloper of the day. Earlier, her little daughter Bobbi Kristina had sat on a director’s chair and watched raptly as mom filmed part of the “Impossible” number, which featured Houston gliding around on a wooden pulley so that it looked like she was flying by Cinderella’s pumpkin coach. Producers and stars feel free to bring their children to work on the set. “Families are longing for this kind of thing--simple family entertainment that people can watch with their children,” says Houston, sounding a theme that many on the show also voice. “And the message is beautiful for children--that everyone has a song to sing.”

As the main singer of that message, Houston insists that she is very aware of the difference between “I Will Always Love You” and a classic theater song. “I know the flavor of what a Rodgers and Hammerstein song deserves,” she says. “I wouldn’t sing it pop or R&B; or gospel. It’s very simple, very classic. These songs were written 40 years ago and they’ve lasted for a reason.”

Aside from Houston’s big new closing number, two more songs were needed to fill out the score. “The Sweetest Sounds,” from the 1962 musical “No Strings” (music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers), was added so that both Cinderella and the Prince could sing about their desires. A new part was created for Jason Alexander, who plays Lionel, a put-upon, quipping servant and valet to the royal family. “We wanted him to have a show-stopping number in the Danny Kaye style,” says Zadan. Two existing comic numbers were combined for Alexander, requiring additional lyrics by Fred Ebb to stitch the whole thing together.

Robert L. Freedman, who wrote the “Cinderella” teleplay, then suggested the addition of a Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart song for the wicked stepmother. Although R&H; also handles the Hart catalog, they said no, feeling that his lyric would be jarring next to Hammerstein’s distinctive style. But then Bernadette Peters was signed for the role, and everyone felt she would handle it just right. Peters sings “Falling in Love with Love” to teach her daughters that they shouldn’t marry for love. Money would be more like it.

Before this, there were two TV “Cinderellas.” The cognoscenti generally agrees that the 1957 Julie Andrews version is best, more sophisticated and funnier than the sincere 1965 remake starring (and introducing) Lesley Ann Warren. Trouble is, very few people remember the 1957 version, which aired once and exists only on kinescope. By ‘65, Hammerstein had died and the new book, by Joseph Schrank, no longer had a sense of tongue-in-cheek. It reflects the irony-free sensibility of conservative family values, 1960s style.

Julie Andrews had been an invincible Cinderella who seemed fully capable of decking her stepmother with the broom she was always pushing around. With her liquid doe eyes, Lesley Ann Warren was a meek Cinderella, easily injured, and her story took on a saccharine tone. The Prince’s parents morphed from a comic married couple (played by Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney) into the stiff and unfunny Walter Pidgeon and Ginger Rogers. Worst of all, the time frame changed from the elegant, vaguely Edwardian to the mindlessly medieval, so that when Cinderella is first spotted by the Prince’s servant, he says to her, “Come out, wench. We will not harm you.”

Still, the Lesley Ann Warren version enchanted kids in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. When it first aired in 1965, it snared a whooping 42.3 rating and a 59 share, which translates into 72.2 million viewers. And the network estimates approximately 30 million watched each of its first two yearly repeats in ’66 and ’67. The numbers dipped down only slightly the next six times it was shown.

Whoopi Goldberg, who plays the queen, remembers the days when a TV show was a major event in a kid’s life. “These things were spectaculars, whether it was the ‘Wizard of Oz’ or ‘Cinderella,’ ” she says. Now that everything is always available for everyone to see, Goldberg believes, that specialness has been lost. But not necessarily forever, even in the age of the VCR. “If you put it out there, if you get people in the habit of seeing it,” she says, referring both to event television and to the musical, “it will become part of the fabric of our lives again.”

“Cinderella” is solidly built, a good specimen to withstand the expectations mounting for it. On Nov. 2, viewers will rediscover the original score, which is an underrated gem. “Ten Minutes Ago,” “Impossible,” “A Lovely Night,” “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful” and “Stepsisters’ Lament” are all terrific songs, rich in romantic or comic texture.

ABC’s promo for its new show starts out in black-and-white. Julie Andrews, looking pristine and perfect, sings “In My Own Little Corner,” which then cuts to Brandy, in living color, picking up the song in a slightly lower key, her creamy voice riding a funkier orchestration that contains more rhythm, more drums and bass. “I’m crazy about what they’ve done with the music,” says Mary Rodgers, who visited the set for a few days in July. “They save the original sound while updating it.”

“When I saw the palace, I almost fainted,” says Chris Montan, a producer on “Cinderella.” There’s no question--the production values on this “Cinderella” far outclass the others, and, at $10 million, it is one of the most expensive two hours ever produced for television. Montan, who has his own production company at Disney, explains that Disney’s expectations of future video sales ensured “Cinderella’s” budget.

The palette is bright and bold, but a great deal of subtlety has also been lavished on the sets, by art director Ed Rubin and production designer Randy Ser. The period, according to director Robert Iscove (who directed and choreographed Sandy Duncan’s “Peter Pan” on Broadway, as well as such TV movies as “Breaking the Silence”) is “nouveau into deco,” with some fin de siecle tributes to Klimt thrown in as well.

The costumes manage to be both funny and stylish--Veanne Cox’s ball gown makes her look like an overpruned tree at Versailles. At the ball itself, the line of dresses in shades of blues, purple and green--including lilacs with touches of gold and silver--make a simmering kettle of color (costumes by Ellen Mirojnick). “There’s so much color,” says Neil Meron, “that you don’t even notice the color of people’s skins.”

In Freedman’s teleplay, the story itself has been gently updated to reflect current ideas about what we should be teaching children. Now, the prince has a democratic impulse. He goes out among his people because he truly wants to understand them. That’s where he first meets Cinderella and speaks with her. The producing team (which also includes executive producers Houston and Debra Chase, as well as Zadan, Meron and Montan) wanted to de-emphasize the falling in love at first sight; they wanted Cinderella and the Prince to talk to each other first. Finally, an effort was made to “empower” Cinderella, says Montan. “We wanted the message from the fairy godmother to be, could have done it all yourself; you just didn’t know it.’ ”

The musical, always a staple of the stage, has been creeping back into film and TV. The first signs of a comeback were the Disney-animated musicals, beginning with “The Little Mermaid” in 1989. Animation made the musical palatable when live action still seemed hopelessly square. As for live action, there are the occasional bold endeavors, like last year’s “Evita,” which couldn’t have been made without a major star like Madonna (Bette Midler did the same for the TV version of “Gypsy” in ‘93).

Then there’s the nouveau musical, Woody Allen’s “Everyone Says I Love You,” which embraces the goofiness of breaking out into song with a postmodern irony. At the same time, the standard Hollywood comedy has also been sneaking in musical interludes: “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “The First Wives Club” were at their most exuberant when characters starting singing. Montan, who also worked on the movie “Sister Act,” recalls, “When the session singers sang ‘My God,’ it lifted the film right up. That was when I knew the movie would be a hit.”

Still, musicals have to be gift-wrapped for a wary public. Designed as the crown piece for the newly refashioned Sunday night “Wonderful World of Disney” series, “Cinderella” is getting a lavish wrapping. The cast is so hot that the supermarket tabloids took notice--running a story about Brandy and Whitney getting into a cat fight on the set, with Whoopi stepping in to break it up. Whitney and Whoopi were never on the set at the same time, but c’est la vie. No ink is bad ink: If more viewers are brought in by the tabloids, so much the better.

Introducing the musical back into the mainstream is a delicate process. “Our dreaded fear, every time someone else makes a musical,” says Zadan, “is that they will do it badly. Then, people say, ‘You can’t do musicals. Musicals don’t work.’ ” Certainly everyone connected with “Cinderella” hopes that they will win one for the Gipper, and further the cause of musicals in general. If all goes well, Zadan and Meron will sign on to produce one musical a year for “The Wonderful World of Disney.”

“People will get a taste for it,” predicts Bernadette Peters, in a sunny mood for a wicked stepmother. “I have a nephew who didn’t know who Sam Cooke was. I played Sam Cooke for him. Now, he can’t imagine life without him.” As for the fate of future generations of musical lovers, Whoopi Goldberg uses a metaphor from the movies: “If you build it, they will come.”