Mary Martin: The First Female Peter Pan

Before Sandy Duncan, Cathy Rigby, and Allison Williams portrayed the female Peter Pan, there was Mary Martin, the first female Peter Pan on Broadway. Texas Native Mary played as Peter Pan in 1954 earning her a Tony Award. Her successful performance portrayal as Peter Pan would be televised in front of a live studio audience. After her death, Her name and her legacy will be forever remembered known as the first female-led Peter Pan.

The Story of Mary Martin

Mary Virginia Martin was born on December 1, 1913, in Weatherford, Texas to her parents Preston Martin and Juanita Presley. Her mother was a music teacher and her father was a lawyer. Throughout her childhood, Martin has a happy childhood and has a close relationship with her parents.

Martin attended private schools and for a year the University of Texas. After a brief first marriage, she opened a dance school in her hometown of Weatherford, Texas. Martin began her career in 1939 in radio as the vocalist on a short-lived revival of The Tuesday Night Party on CBS. In 1940, she was a singer on NBC's Good News of 1940, which was renamed Maxwell House Coffee Time during that year. Martin was given a small part in Leave It to Me, a Cole Porter musical, in November 1938 and wowed the audience with her steamy rendition of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” A hit engagement at the Rainbow Room followed, and she then returned to Hollywood to appear in a series of movies, including The Great Victor Herbert (1939), Birth of the Blues (1941), and Star-Spangled Rhythm (1942). In 1943 she returned to Broadway in the musical One Touch of Venus, book by S.J. Perelman and Ogden Nash, music by Kurt Weill, and choreography by Agnes de Mille. According to many critics, the show was a huge success largely owing to Martin’s performance, and the Broadway run and subsequent tour kept her busy into 1945. Her performance won her a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. In 1946 she appeared in Night and Day, a film biography of Cole Porter. In the same year, she appeared on Broadway in Lute Song and made her London debut in Noël Coward’s Pacific 1860. From 1947 to 1948 she toured in Annie Get Your Gun, for which she won a special Tony Award.

Mary Martin is Peter Pan

In 1954, Martin gained her next big break. Martin was cast as Peter Pan in Peter Pan the musical. The show was a box office success, but critics expected it to have more musical numbers that featured Mary Martin, so director Jerome Robbins hired lyricists Comden and Green and composer Jule Styne to add more songs, including "Never Never Land", "Distant Melody" and several other numbers, turning the show into a full-scale musical.

The musical premiered at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco on July 19, 1954. The initial four-week run was followed by an eight-week engagement in Los Angeles. The show opened on Broadway on October 20, 1954, at the Winter Garden Theatre for a planned limited run of 152 performances. The busy 1954 Broadway season also included The Boy Friend, Fanny, Silk Stockings, and Damn Yankees. While still in tryouts, a deal was made for Peter Pan to be broadcast on the NBC anthology series Producers' Showcase on March 7, 1955, which ensured that it was a financial success despite the limited run. The revised score made the musical a critical success, and tickets sold out throughout the Broadway run. In 1955, Martin received a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical. The show closed on February 26, 1955, to prepare for the television broadcast.

After the Broadway success, Fred Coe, production manager for NBC in New York, began work on Producers' Showcase, a 90-minute anthology series that aired every fourth Monday for three seasons. One aim of the series was to broadcast expensive color spectaculars to promote the new color television system developed by NBC's parent company RCA. On March 7, 1955, NBC presented Peter Pan live as part of Producers' Showcase (with nearly all of the show's original cast) as the first full-length Broadway production on color TV.

The show attracted a then-record audience of 65 million viewers, the highest ever up to that time for a single television program. Martin earned an Emmy award for the television production. The production was restaged three times until 1960.

Martin continued performing on Broadway as Maria in The Sound of Music until October 1961, which she also earned another Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical.

In 1966, she appeared on Broadway in the two-person musical I Do! I Do! with Robert Preston and was nominated for the Tony Award (Leading Actress in a Musical). A national tour with Preston began in March 1968 but was canceled early due to Martin's illness. Although she appeared in nine films between 1938 and 1943, she was generally passed over for the filmed version of the musical plays. She once explained that she did not enjoy making films because she did not have the connection with an audience that she had in live performances. The closest that she ever came to preserving her stage performances was her television appearances as Peter Pan. The Broadway production from 1954 was subsequently performed on NBC television in RCA's compatible color in 1955, 1956, and 1960. Martin also preserved her 1957 stage performance as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun when NBC television broadcast the production live that year. While Martin did not enjoy making films, she frequently appeared on television. Her last feature film appearance was a cameo as herself in MGM's Main Street to Broadway in 1953. Martin made an appearance in 1980 in a Royal Variety Performance in London performing "Honeybun" from South Pacific. Martin appeared in the play Legends with Carol Channing in a one-year US national tour opening in Dallas on January 9, 1986. In September 1963, a statue of Peter Pan dedicated to her was unveiled at her hometown Weatherford, donated by the Peter Pan Peanut Butter Company. Martin was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1973. She received the Kennedy Center Honors, an annual honor for career achievements, in 1989.

Martin died of cancer at age 76 at her home in Rancho Mirage, California, on November 3, 1990

Her "Pan" Legacy

Before Martin's 1990 passing, the Peter Pan musical was revived on Broadway in 1979 starring Sandy Duncan as Peter Pan. The show was revived in 1979 on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre was a success yet again. Duncan earned a Tony nomination and ran for 554 performances.

The 1960 production of Peter Pan that starred Martin was released on VHS and LaserDisc home video in 1990 and on DVD on October 19, 1999. After Martin's passing, former gymnast Cathy Rigby was cast as Pan in the 1990 Peter Pan Broadway Revival. She continued to portray as Peter Pan in Broadway even went on tour.

I have already written an article story on Cathy if you would like to know about Cathy:

In 2000, A&E presented a TV production of the Broadway show, starring Cathy Rigby, recorded in front of a live audience. Rigby received positive reviews from critics for her role as Peter Pan and was also nominated for a Tony Award. In 2014, NBC broadcast Peter Pan Live!, a new production of the musical starring Allison Williams as Peter.

Source

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Martin

Wikipedia