Shangri-La

This appears to be a musical done for television by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, based on LOST HORIZON. With a cast led by Richard Basehart in the Ronald Colman role and Claude Rains in the role of the the High Lama (Sam Jaffe in the original film) it sounds like it should have had potential (Rains probably could have handled singing - he had done some in a television film with Van Johnson about THE PIED PIPER a few years earlier). With Barry Nelson and Alice Ghostley in the cast it really sounds intriguing (I presume Nelson was playing the brother role - the one that John Howard played in the original movie). What also makes this seem curious is that there would later be a full movie version of LOST HORIZON with music, but it was a flop. One wonders if this was a better attempt. Maybe it still exists.

To the poster above: Yes, it does exist. It was based on a flop Broadway musical that ran for about three weeks in 1956, with music by Harry Warren and lyrics by Lawrence and Lee. It tells the old Lost Horizon story relatively straightforwardly, and Basehart, in the Ronald Colman role, sings very badly. Rains doesn't sing at all. The rest of the cast is interesting: Ghostley, who had appeared in the Broadway version, has one not-bad song, and Gene Nelson and Helen Gallagher do an appealing pas de deux (choreography by Nelson). Marisa Pavan sings pleasantly, and James Valentine, as the young doubter, is excellent--he should have had more of a career. I've never quite understood the appeal of James Hilton's original story (and look how badly it was done in 1973), and this version is hampered by substandard production values, but it is probably superior to the Ross Hunter version, and that such a large Broadway failure could ever have landed on coast-to-coast television at all is kind of fascinating.