'Golden Age' a Champion of Theater and its Importance!

Rick McKay turned his love of theater into a historic quest. Using his own money and video camera, he spent five years tracking down Broadway stars and interviewing them for "Broadway: The Golden Age," a documentary that opens today.

The fact that McKay was able to pull a movie together and get it released is a triumph in and of itself. On top of that, "The Golden Age" is 111 minutes of pure Broadway bliss! It's full of fascinating theater lore and gives 21st century theater freaks a glimpse into another, very different age and into a theater community, a New York and an America that is long gone. Ultimately, though, the movie is a champion of theater and its importance in the realm of culture and entertainment.

Jeremy Irons calls live theater a "miracle." Carol Channing says there will never be a substitute for a live theater experience, and Carol Burnett agrees. "(TV and film) can't do the same thing because the actors and the audience aren't breathing the same oxygen," she says. In a fiery and direct address to the camera, Elizabeth Ashley waves a cigarette and intones: "The theater is, above all else, live!" Hard to argue with that.

The screen image of this "Golden Age" has that ragged, grainy look of video blown up to screen size, but it's hard to complain about technical aspects of the film when you consider that McKay had no crew and did the entire thing himself. The lack of big-budget fuss must be the reason his interviews are so personable and why many of the stars interviewed seem so relaxed.

Just about anyone who was anyone on the Great White Way sat down with McKay to talk about what has become known as Broadway's "Golden Age," the 1940s through the mid-1960s. McKay only started shooting in 1998, so he had already missed many legends. And nearly all of the dozen people he managed to talk to -- Uta Hagen, Gwen Verdon, Ann Miller, Al Hirschfeld, Hume Cronyn, Kim Hunter and Adolph Green among them -- have died since. He also had the great luck to talk with Julie Harris just before her stroke.

Some of the reigning divas -- Andrews, Minnelli, Streisand -- are missing, but when you have the likes of director Hal Prince, Sondheim and composers Kander and Ebb represented, the absentees don't matter much.

"Broadway: The Golden Age" is a heartfelt, personal story inspired by McKay's love of the Broadway myth. He grew up in Indiana loving musicals and backstage dramas. He moved to New York in 1981 hoping to find Times Square as bright as it was in 1948. Instead he found a seedy 42nd Street, "Cats" and ghosts of a Golden Age. This movie, a true labor of love, is McKay's attempt to connect with Broadway at its best and to preserve its fast-fading history.

There's definitely a sense of loss and sadness permeating the movie, a kind of "they don't make 'em like they used to" aura. It's hard not to wallow in triumphs of the past, but when you consider that in a single year such as 1959, the average New York theatergoer could choose from "West Side Story," "The Sound of Music," "My Fair Lady," "Gypsy," "The Miracle Worker" and "A Raisin in the Sun," it's hard not to think the best days are behind us.

McKay asks his subjects about the first theater experience that impressed them. For Sondheim, it was attending the very first "Carousel" preview with his mentor Oscar Hammerstein. For Michele Lee, it was seeing Ethel Merman in "Gypsy." For Leslie Uggams and Jerry Orbach, it was seeing Harris and Ethel Waters in "A Member of the Wedding."

Certain names are spoken with great reverence in this film, Harris' and Waters' among them. These are the people that actors, writers and audience members revere and whose work has been seared into the collective memory.

Other names on that legend list are Kim Stanley, Marlon Brando and Laurette Taylor, a nearly forgotten Broadway luminary whose work in "The Glass Menagerie" rates as an all-time highlight for many. McKay has unearthed the only existing sound film footage of Taylor, and it's fascinating to watch her in a 1938 screen test she made for David O. Selznick.

There are also some brief but fascinating home movie clips of Angela Lansbury in "Mame," Ann Miller in "The George White Scandals of 1939" and the original cast of "Gypsy." Among the incredible archival footage is John Raitt singing "Soliloquy" from "Carousel," Verdon and Bob Fosse rehearsing "Whatever Lola Wants" from "Damn Yankees" and Stanley and Elaine Stritch in a scene from "Bus Stop."

There's seemingly no end to the treasures in "Broadway: The Golden Age." It makes you long for the day when Broadway, what George S. Kaufman called "the fabulous invalid," was livelier, more original and culturally important.

Hardly a pessimist, filmmaker McKay doesn't dwell on the passing of the Golden Age because, as he says, "There's some kid in Beech Grove, Ind., or some small town sitting in front of his computer downloading songs over the Internet from 'Hairspray' or 'The Producers,' and that's his movie to make in 20 years.”

By Chad Jones