Broadway: The Golden Age, Rick McKay’s wonderful documentary about the greatest days of the Great White Way, has suddenly become a super-hot public-TV pledge-week item. New York’s WNET showed it last Sunday opposite the season premiere of The Sopranos, and their phone bank went wild. Now they’re planning to show it three more times, on Saturday at ten p.m. and midnight and next Monday at two a.m. (plus two additional showings in April). Other stations have been making the same discovery, and so there’ll be showings of Broadway: The Golden Age all across the country this weekend.
Here’s part of what I wrote about Broadway: The Golden Age in The Wall Street Journal last year:
Mr. McKay knows when to ease back on the throttle and simply let his subjects talk. And talk they do, often amusingly and always movingly, about what it was like to work alongside such near-forgotten giants as Laurette Taylor (who is seen in her Hollywood screen test, the only sound film she ever made) and Kim Stanley (where on earth did Mr. McKay dredge up what looks like a kinescope of a live performance of “Bus Stop”?). You’ll weep–I did–to hear them share their fond memories of crummy apartments, Automat meals and big breaks….
For a complete listing of upcoming TV showings of Broadway: The Golden Age, go here.