Broadway storyteller
Filmmaker Rick McKay claims he is haunted by dead Broadway diva Gwen Verdon. Not literally, but the fact McKay conducted the final interview with Verdon only weeks before her death in 2001 provided the compulsion for him to complete the work he is doing.
New York-based McKay’s first film, the award-winning documentary Broadway: The Golden Age, was a six-year labour of love which recorded the great tales of Broadway in its post-war years, as told through interviews with the stars who made history.
Verdon, the stage star of Sweet Charity and Chicago, was one of the first interviews McKay conducted. Upon completing their talk she asked him why no one had ever made such a documentary before.
She said to me, -˜No one ever asked about how we did this and how we made these shows,’ McKay recalled while on a flying visit through Sydney this week. She was dead two weeks later, and that has haunted me ever since.
I figured you have got to do these things as these people won’t be around forever, and if someone doesn’t do this these amazing stories are lost. So that became my mission.
But it is something I love as I feel I am getting to fix history. I am setting the stories straight and I am getting to say this is what it really was all about, and then I put it together in my films.
Broadway: The Golden Age won 15 awards on the international festival circuit upon its release in 2003. The film presented a range of former Broadway luminaries including Shirley MacLaine, Angela Lansbury, Carol Channing, Jerry Herman and Stephen Sondheim.
Since the success of the film McKay has been at work on two sequels -“ Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age and Broadway: The Next Generation, which focuses on the stars of today.
Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age is set for release early next year and features the stars of the 1960s and 70s reflecting on their time on the New York stage, including Liza Minnelli, Robert Redford, Glenn Close, Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman.
Also included in the topics of the new film will be a section about gay actors telling what it was like to work in theatre through that time, as well as the impact A Chorus Line had not only on popular culture but also on the cast who created the Pulitzer Prize-winning show.
The stories behind the scenes are as fascinating as what was happening on stage, McKay says. The entire cast of A Chorus Line were all told they would become huge stars, but for Sammy Williams, who won a Tony Award for playing Paul, within one year he was working as a towel boy in a gay spa in LA. He was forgotten.
No one remembers the cast of A Chorus Line now, but these are the people who made history and changed everything that came after it. But no one ever asks what you do when the curtain goes down.
Well, I am asking those questions and the responses are fascinating.
info
Broadway: The Golden Age is available at www.ezydvd.com.au. Broadway: Beyond The Golden Age is due for release in early 2008.
