Goodyear Theatre broadcast this unsold TV pilot, as often was done back then, but it merely shows how pointless some of those projects were back then (as now, one supposes). It's an attempt to join the TV Westerns bandwagon, but fails miserably.
I was a big fan at the time of Westerns, and religiously watched quite a few every week, particularly favoring "Rawhide", "Yancy Derringer" and "Black Saddle". Peter Breck played a lawyer in the Old West and though the show ("Black Saddle") was not a hit, it impressed me.
"Show Wagon" also stars a lawyer played by Luke Anthony, but has a rickety premise that is quite a head-scratcher: why would any audience latch on to this clunker? It deals with Luke as part of a traveling drama troupe led by Jack Albertson, traveling from town to town in a covered wagon to present Shakespeare performances and other plays to rubes strived for entertainment. In this pilot episode, they perform "The Bride of the Brigand", a play set in Italy that was hoary in 1958 and downright unbelievably bad in 2024. "Hamlet" is announced for the next town's performance, which might have been watchable.
It's obvious what the point of this show was: to demonstrate in a folksy way a different aspect of Western mythology, namely the entertainment side which we know from movies included popular entertainers like Lily Langtry and of course the dancehall girls and a piano player.
This aspect of the show had me thinking of a possible success here -perhaps a show about Lily Langtry might have captured the popular imagination. Or perhaps as Bergman successfully did in his classic movie "The Seventh Seal" a couple of years earlier, the traveling show troupe could be counterpointed by a serious ongoing drama (in that case The Black Plague).
Instead we have this lousy play performed badly (on purpose) by an untalented group of actors. The show's lead Luke Anthony, as both lawyer and novice actor in the plays, is terrible, and if IMDb's credits list for him is thorough, his acting career was a total flop. Show's leading lady Connie Hines proved to be a one-hit wonder, as female lead of the beloved series "Mr. Ed". Jack Albertson is merely okay.
The Western story going on while the show keeps returning to the stage show is a corny saga of a bank robbery where one of the robbers is in town to harass his ex-wife, resulting in her killing him in self-defense and proving instrumental in thwarting that robbery. A striking brunette actress Sandra Knight, who had co-starred in Robert Mitchum's classic "Thunder Road" plus a string of horror movies, is impressive as the pilot's guest star, but all the thanks she gets is lousy billing buried in the end credits.
