This is really an enjoyable film - essentially excerpts from interviews with many of the acting stars (plus Sondheim and Prince) on Broadway from 1945 to 1970.
It is gently shaped in chapters such as the actors' first feelings on arrival in New York, how they got by, how they learned of available parts, what they liked to do after the show, how Broadway has changed. Many of the interviews contain fascinating and humorous anecdotes - told well by obvious experts at the game.
To illustrate the interviews, the director has found much rare footage of screen tests, audio or video recordings of the plays, photographs of New York at different periods, playbills, posters that are shown as the audio interview proceeds. He has done a wonderful job.
About five years ago, I (finally) obtained cable television. When I saw there existed a one hour program called "Inside the Actor's Studio", I thought it would be rather like this film - hour long interviews with everyone from Uta Hagen to Celeste Holm, from Hume Cronyn to Frank Langella. To my surprise, the program instead consists of interviews with those spoken about each evening on "Entertainment Tonight" or "Access Hollywood".
I do have a question about the title. I am not at all sure that I would call the period 1945-1970 the "golden age" rather than simply the second half of a golden age that began at the end of World War I. Certainly the period 1919-1945 was as extraordinary as the later quarter century. Imagine the earlier quarter century and the premieres in the U.S. of plays and revues from Eugene O'Neill, Jerome Kern, Rodgers & Hart, George M. Cohan, Oscar Hammerstein (I), Flo Ziegfeld, Sidney Howard, George White, George Carroll, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Lawrence Stallings, Marc Connelly, George S. Kaufman, Clifford Odets, Marc Blitzstein, Cole Porter, Sidney Kingsley, Moss Hart.
I also have the feeling that the period 1919-1945 was a more "international" period on Broadway than the later period. I would guess that productions (often American premieres) were far more common in this period than the later quarter century: of Chekhov and Hauptmann, Schnitzler and Grillparzer, Anouilh and Claudel, Gorky and Sudermann, Hoffmansthal and Shaw, Pinero and Coward and Lonsdale and Strindberg and Ibsen and Cocteau and Genet and Pirandello.
There's something to be said for the assumption that the New York audience would delight in dramas set far away in different cultures - and that the New York directors, set designers, musicians and actors could well handle them. Imagine the first reactions of an audience in the 1920s, 1930s or 1940s to the first productions of The Weavers or Arms and the Man, Three Sisters or Enemy of the People.
Moroever, if the director does choose to make a (necessarily different form of) movie about the earlier period - we can learn far more about other legends such as Eva LeGallienne, the Lunts, the Barrymores, Helen Hayes, Katherine Cornell, Ziegfeld, Rose, Belasco, the making of Showboat, etc.
(Yet of course I understand why the director limited the film to the later period - i) the film is guided by his enthusiasm and he was born after World War II, ii) those from the earlier period are mostly dead - this is primarily an interview program, iii) the audience is more likely to remember later plays and musicals, and iv) the audience is more likely to respond to more recently written and staged plays and musicals).
I was pleased to see the plaudits to Laurette Taylor. If he were alive and interviewed, the director would have heard Lawrence Olivier echo those in this film, since he has written himself (in either "Confessions of an Actor" or "On Acting") that her performance in The Glass Menagerie was the greatest acting performance he had ever seen. (He also wrote that the best 'Hamlet' he'd ever seen was not by an Englishman, but by John Barrymore on Broadway).
It is gently shaped in chapters such as the actors' first feelings on arrival in New York, how they got by, how they learned of available parts, what they liked to do after the show, how Broadway has changed. Many of the interviews contain fascinating and humorous anecdotes - told well by obvious experts at the game.
To illustrate the interviews, the director has found much rare footage of screen tests, audio or video recordings of the plays, photographs of New York at different periods, playbills, posters that are shown as the audio interview proceeds. He has done a wonderful job.
About five years ago, I (finally) obtained cable television. When I saw there existed a one hour program called "Inside the Actor's Studio", I thought it would be rather like this film - hour long interviews with everyone from Uta Hagen to Celeste Holm, from Hume Cronyn to Frank Langella. To my surprise, the program instead consists of interviews with those spoken about each evening on "Entertainment Tonight" or "Access Hollywood".
I do have a question about the title. I am not at all sure that I would call the period 1945-1970 the "golden age" rather than simply the second half of a golden age that began at the end of World War I. Certainly the period 1919-1945 was as extraordinary as the later quarter century. Imagine the earlier quarter century and the premieres in the U.S. of plays and revues from Eugene O'Neill, Jerome Kern, Rodgers & Hart, George M. Cohan, Oscar Hammerstein (I), Flo Ziegfeld, Sidney Howard, George White, George Carroll, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Lawrence Stallings, Marc Connelly, George S. Kaufman, Clifford Odets, Marc Blitzstein, Cole Porter, Sidney Kingsley, Moss Hart.
I also have the feeling that the period 1919-1945 was a more "international" period on Broadway than the later period. I would guess that productions (often American premieres) were far more common in this period than the later quarter century: of Chekhov and Hauptmann, Schnitzler and Grillparzer, Anouilh and Claudel, Gorky and Sudermann, Hoffmansthal and Shaw, Pinero and Coward and Lonsdale and Strindberg and Ibsen and Cocteau and Genet and Pirandello.
There's something to be said for the assumption that the New York audience would delight in dramas set far away in different cultures - and that the New York directors, set designers, musicians and actors could well handle them. Imagine the first reactions of an audience in the 1920s, 1930s or 1940s to the first productions of The Weavers or Arms and the Man, Three Sisters or Enemy of the People.
Moroever, if the director does choose to make a (necessarily different form of) movie about the earlier period - we can learn far more about other legends such as Eva LeGallienne, the Lunts, the Barrymores, Helen Hayes, Katherine Cornell, Ziegfeld, Rose, Belasco, the making of Showboat, etc.
(Yet of course I understand why the director limited the film to the later period - i) the film is guided by his enthusiasm and he was born after World War II, ii) those from the earlier period are mostly dead - this is primarily an interview program, iii) the audience is more likely to remember later plays and musicals, and iv) the audience is more likely to respond to more recently written and staged plays and musicals).
I was pleased to see the plaudits to Laurette Taylor. If he were alive and interviewed, the director would have heard Lawrence Olivier echo those in this film, since he has written himself (in either "Confessions of an Actor" or "On Acting") that her performance in The Glass Menagerie was the greatest acting performance he had ever seen. (He also wrote that the best 'Hamlet' he'd ever seen was not by an Englishman, but by John Barrymore on Broadway).