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Broadway: The Golden Age -- By The Legends Who Were... : Review

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You don't have to own a treasured stash of vintage Playbills to be susceptible to the spell of Rick McKay's stardusted valentine to the New York theater scene of the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Once the legends (it seems churlish to add quotation marks), many aged and frail but all still burning from within, start pouring out their stories of being young, ambitious and in love with the theater, the sheer force of their impassioned memories is hard to resist. Indiana-born director, writer, editor AND cameramanB eech Grove and producer McKay spent their small-town childhood sdreaming of Broadway's sophistication and glamour, but moved to New York in the early 1980s to find that the parade had already passed by. McKay pursued a singing career until the '90s, when a friend's recommendation got him a gig shooting original footage of drag queens for THE BIRDCAGE (1996) stars Robin Williams and Nathan Lane to study. Having discovered that half the secret of moviemaking was picking up a camera and pointing it at something interesting, McKay decided to document the fabled Broadway of his youthful dreams through the words of the professionals who made it great, beginning with old theater hands he knew personally. He eventually interviewed nearly 100 actors, writers and directors, from Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim to Gwen Verdon and Fay Wray, several of whom died before the film was completed. They describe scrimping to buy theater tickets — Carol Burnett recalls chipping in with three roommates to buy a single good dress that each took turns wearing to auditions — making the rounds of casting directors' offices, trading tips at drugstore lunch counters and getting that first lucky break. When McKay asks about influences, the name Laurette Taylor looms large; her utterly natural-seeming performances as Mrs. Midget in the 1938 revival of Outward Bound and Amanda Wingfield in the original production of The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams wrote the part for her) astonished and inspired a generation of aspiring performers. Their collective voices are mesmerizing, even if they're recalling their own golden ages of youthful optimism as much as Broadway's; they're supported by rare archival material that includes the only sound footage ever taken of the elusive Taylor, a screen test for David O. Selznick that failed to get her a single movie role. What could easily have been a sentimental, fannish exercise in musty nostalgia is in fact a lovely tribute to an era of feverish creativity that seemed as though it would never end yet now lives only in memory. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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