When it comes to internet insults, few are more cutting than “theater kid.” The moniker conjures up images of Rachel Berry from Glee and Corky St. Clair from Waiting For Guffman, and the accusation of “theater kid energy” has unfairly disrupted the careers of everyone from Anne Hathaway to Rachel Zegler. Yet to the average person, the true theater kid experience remains a mystery. What goes on during long afternoon rehearsals, late-night cast parties, and post-show fracturing is hard to explain if you haven’t personally experienced the supportive, competitive, explosive energy of making theater. Thankfully, curious mainstream audiences can get a little taste of the ephemeral experience in the crowd-pleasing documentary You Had To Be There, which pulls back the curtain on a single production of Godspell in Toronto in 1972—one that just happened to give birth to some of the biggest names in comedy history.
Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber, Andrea Martin, and Paul Shaffer are just a few of the famous faces who got their start in the Canadian production of the Stephen Schwartz musical. Documentary director Nick Davis gathers all the living cast members as well as modern comedy and musical theater legends like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mike Myers, and Janeane Garofalo for talking head interviews that try to recreate the “gestalt feeling” of the production, using animated segments to fill in for the fact that no actual footage of the show exists. (Hence, “you had to be there.”)
Ostensibly, the documentary is interested in the massive family tree of comedy that sprang out of the era. (“The 1972 Toronto production of Godspell is weirdly the ’27 Yankees of comedy,” Miranda explains.) The film’s full title is You Had To Be There: How The Toronto Godspell Ignited The Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, And Created A Community That Changed The World (In A Canadian Kind Of Way). Yet what rings out even more powerfully is its love letter to the theater kid experience, which it turns out feels the same whether you’re doing college theater in Illinois or a future all-star production in Canada.
That starts with the cheeky reveal that audio from the show was “recorded illegally” by Short, who snuck a cassette recorder onto a piece of the set one night. While “theater kid” is sometimes used synonymously with “Type-A goody two-shoes,” there’s an anarchic nature to the true theater kid experience. If comedians are the cool kids of the entertainment world and theater kids are the dorks, You Had To Be There argues the line between them is thinner than it seems. Godspell itself is a slightly anarchic show that retells the Gospel Of Matthew with a group of overall-wearing hippie clowns. It was a hit off-Broadway in 1971 and soon inspired a wave of regional productions that each brought their own flair to the material.
Bouncing back and forth between the history of the production and stories about its individual cast members, the doc details the many different reasons the Toronto crew were drawn to theater to begin with. For Short, it was a way to carry on his childhood love of the Rat Pack and find joy after losing his mother at 17 and his father at 20. For Martin, it was a stabilizing anchor while growing up an Armenian girl desperate to fit in in Portland, Maine. For Radner, it was the only possible outlet for the kind of manically endearing comedic energy she would later bring to Saturday Night Live.
To emphasize how ridiculous it can be to make a living as an actor, Davis unearths footage of Short as a talking Visa card in a commercial and Martin and Levy as lovers in a horror B-movie called Cannibal Girls. But he also emphasizes how high-stakes the acting world feels for those inside it too. Even 50 years later, Martin can recall every grueling detail of what it felt like to be cut after her initial Godspell audition—right down to the exact order she placed at the coffee shop where she went to cry. Meanwhile, Short and Levy still remember all the specifics of how Levy took over their group callback so they wouldn’t be forced to play minor roles in an improvised retelling of the story of the prodigal son.
It all adds to the sense of theater as an intensely collaborative, physically grueling experience that bonds people in a way few other artforms do. Short’s cassette recorder also came out at “Friday Night Services,” weekly cast parties at Short and Levy’s house where other Canadian comedians like Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, John Candy, and Lorne Michaels regularly stopped by. The tapes reveal all sorts of silly in-jokes and riffs from the Godspell cast. “Listening to that group, you would think we’d known each other for 10 years,” Short muses. “We’d known each other for three months.”
Either pretentiously or accurately, multiple interviewees compare Toronto in the 1970s to Paris in the 1920s. That includes a complex web of romances Shaffer dubs “a little incestuous—mostly figuratively, a little bit literally.” Short and Radner dated on and off for two years before he married his wife Nancy Dolman, who was an understudy in Godspell. That the whole trio remained friends until Radner’s death of cancer at age 42 is another example of an underdiscussed theater kid experience, where romantic relationships come and go but the bonds of the group stay.
Indeed, what really elevates You Had To Be There is its willingness to delve into the more bittersweet side of the theater kid experience. Garber left the production early into its run because he was cast as Jesus in the film adaptation, which led to jealousy within the cast. And while Godspell served as a launching pad for several storied Hollywood careers, other cast members like Jayne Eastwood and Rudy Webb stayed in Canada to raise their families and never became household names. Anyone who’s earned a theater degree knows the feeling of being on one side or the other of that equation.
Most moving of all are interviews with Avril Chown, a singer and go-go dancer who felt empowered by the genderless nature of Godspell‘s clown characters. Her palpable love of her time in Godspell is contrasted with the moment she opens up for the first time about her subsequent job on a CBS variety show, where she was sexually assaulted by a fellow cast member. “How much blood do you want to give for something you love?” she asks. “I lost my joy of the business.” Though the theater kid stereotype is a fun, bubbly one—as Chown so often is in her segments—that doesn’t equate to a sheltered or frictionless life.
While the third act of You Had To Be There traces the production’s impact on Saturday Night Live, SCTV, and multiple generations of comedy, it ends on the ultimate theater-kid note: a big reunion party for the Godspell cast. After wine, cake, and catching up, the group of 70-somethings slowly wander towards the piano where they sing through most of the Godspell score, a tradition they apparently carry on even when cameras aren’t rolling. “It’s just something that you just kind of have to do,” Levy laughs. That might not make sense to everyone watching, but the theater kids will get it.
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