Broadway Open House - Cast and Crew

Cast and Crew

Other Broadway Open House cast members were tap dancer Ray Malone, accordionist Milton DeLugg, announcer Wayne Howell and vocalists Jane Harvey, Andy Roberts and David Street. The show's opening theme music was "The Beanbag Song" by DeLugg, Lester and Willie Stein. A second theme was the song "It's Almost Like Being in Love." DeLugg often played a song he wrote with Stein, "Orange Colored Sky", which became a hit for Nat King Cole.

Ray Buffum and Jac Hein were the producers. Hein and Joseph C. Cavalier directed. Stan Burns and Allan Sherman were the writers. The program was developed by Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, a programming vice-president at NBC who had started his career as a production assistant on Fred Allen's radio show Town Hall Tonight in the 1930s. After the 15-month run of Broadway Open House, Weaver further developed his ideas on a local show over NBC's New York station starring Steve Allen, which eventually took to the network in 1954 as The Tonight Show.

Steve Allen remembered Hornsby, Broadway Open House and Fred Allen in a 1997 interview:

NBC had tried unsuccessfully to do late night television with the comedian Jerry Lester and with Morey Amsterdam in the early 1950s, but that did not go over well with the viewers. I'm not certain the quality of the show had anything to do with it. At that point in time, you still had a limited number of television sets and television had still not come to a lot of the medium-sized cities around the country. I think you had a lot of people in the network executive suites who were convinced 11 o'clock was just too late for people to stay up and watch television. If that original show (Broadway Open House) had been done five years later, they may have changed their minds, because they did a lot of the same kind of humor we did later... Any time a performer dies in the process of doing a television series or a Broadway show, it's a difficult proposition how to proceed in good taste. With Fred Allen, this was in the mid-1950s and while he was never as successful in television, he had been an icon in radio... This may have been the first time, or at least one of the first times, a performer in television died while in the midst of doing a regular show. A comedian named Don Hornsby was supposed to do NBC's first late-night show, but he died two weeks before the show went on the air, so the audience had not yet seen him. But Fred Allen was one of the great humorists in the history of entertainment to that time, and the nation was still in shock because people had just seen him the previous Sunday night.