Do people know when they're living in a golden age? Surely it must have occurred to New Yorkers in the '50s that the chance to catch a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical one night and a Tennessee Williams play the next wouldn't come their way again. Growing up in Beech Grove, Indiana, Broadway: The Golden Age director Rick McKay dreamed of entering the Broadway world he'd read about in the newspapers, but by the time he reached it in the early '80s, it had long since disappeared, replaced by rock operas and big-budget, tourist-oriented imports. That lends an extra poignancy to Broadway: The Golden Age, McKay's oral history of a theatrical era that seems unlikely to find an equivalent.
McKay has a background at PBS and A&E, and it shows. In Golden Age, he does little more than stitch together rare footage and clips of interviews with everyone from a typically acerbic Bea Arthur to a bizarrely outfitted Tommy Tune. The film doesn't aspire to reinvent the form, but it works well enough, and even its oft-repeated stories should enchant theater fans. Shirley MacLaine's ascent from chorus girl to understudy to star would seem like a cliché if it hadn't actually happened, and hearing MacLaine tell the story herself with undisguised glee gives it an extra kick.
Given such eager storytellers, it's too bad McKay's film never finds a real focus: It simply clicks through the era's high points, no matter how obvious. (Marlon Brando, for example, apparently influenced a lot of his contemporaries, and boy, did that West Side Story make an impact.) Overall, however, the film feels like an act of historical preservation, a purpose reinforced by the closing credits' checklist of interview subjects who died before the film's release. McKay's interviewees never come to a consensus about what made the stretch from WWII to the debut of Hair so special, but Golden Age confirms it as a remarkable time. In one of the film's most persuasive bits, Farley Granger talks about chucking a lucrative film career in order to tread the boards in New York. Maybe it's that kind of magnetic draw that makes an age golden.
