Fifty years after Donny & Marie first hit the airwaves, Donny Osmond can look back on the comedic elements of his and his sister’s variety show and admit they were “kind of silly.”
“We never really knew anything about variety television,” the former teen idol recently told PEOPLE, referring to himself and sibling Marie Osmond. “We were thrown into comedy, and that’s why I say some of the comedy stuff is kind of silly, because we weren’t comedians. We’re singers, but it’s forgivable when you think of the time element, and it’s kind of endearing, at least it is for me. It’s so fun to look back and say, ‘Oh, I should have done that differently, and that was so stupid,’ but it worked.”
The variety show, which was inspired by the popular Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, premiered Jan. 23, 1976. It also served as a star vehicle to further promote the Osmond siblings, who were already pop stars in their own right. Donny & Marie, which ultimately aired on ABC through May 1979, was so popular that it forced the siblings to postpone their music careers for a bit so they could promote their other endeavor.
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Donny and Marie Osmond receive a star on the Las Vegas strip in 2019
Donny credits some of that aforementioned “endearing” quality with the show’s success.
“The Donny & Marie team, there was something about it that was just organic,” he said. “It was real. It wasn’t manufactured because if it were manufactured, a lot of people would take shots at it, and they did. Over the years, they’d take shots at Donny & Marie because of the goody-goody factor.”
In 2021, Donny began a solo residency at Harrah’s Las Vegas, and that show takes fans back through every decade of his career, including his stint on Donny & Marie, which he said still makes him emotional half a century later.
“I love my show to pieces,” he said. “I mean, I work my butt off, and I love every moment of those 90 minutes each night, but there’s a lump in my throat when I turn around, and I’m singing ‘In My Life,’ and I’m seeing the Donny & Marie show from first perspective.”
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Donny, 68, and Marie, 66, last performed together in 2019, after an 11-year joint residency at the Flamingo Las Vegas. When asked by PEOPLE if an onstage reunion might be in the cards, Donny replied, “Just to do one concert, it’s an enormous amount of rehearsals to get the show ready for one show. So if you’re going to do that, you might as well do a residency, and that’s not going to happen.”
In the meantime, Donny’s show returns to Vegas starting Jan. 27.
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