The director of the documentary “Show Business: The Road to Broadway” is Dori Berinstein, an experienced Broadway producer. Who better to document a season of new openings on the Great White Way?
Well, perhaps someone with a little distance. Without a doubt, the access Berinstein gets in “Show Business” is probably due to her familiarity with the turf and its principal players. But this movie is a gushing valentine to the business of show, not a searching look inside an interesting (and costly) world.
The film covers the 2003-04 season of Broadway musicals, especially four highly anticipated shows that would eventually compete for the main Tony Awards.
The most famous of these shows is “Wicked,” a mega-musical with a new angle on the good and bad witches in “The Wizard of Oz.”
The most notorious of the shows is “Taboo,” based on the life of Boy George, which was flagrantly and noisily produced by Rosie O’Donnell. O’Donnell’s aggressive cheerleading, and the show’s well-publicized pre-opening problems, made this the designated train wreck of the year.
There’s also “Avenue Q,” a puppet musical and quasi-spoof of “Sesame Street,” and “Caroline, or Change,” an ambitious race-relations piece by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner (an attempt to bring new seriousness to the Broadway musical).
The film definitely has no shortage of colorful characters. Among the actors, we have “Caroline” star Tonya Pinkins attempting a professional and personal comeback after tragedy; young Scots actor Euan Morton filling the flamboyant shoes of Boy George, whom he portrays on stage; and Idina Menzel, the sincere performer whose showstopping talent (and green makeup) made her “Wicked” turn a star-making one.
Also in the mix are such veteran stage folk as director George C. Wolfe and composer Stephen Schwartz. The movie gravitates toward the songwriters of “Avenue Q,” Jeff Marx and Bobby Lopez, whose goofy enthusiasm for the whole process makes them the sentimental favorites when Tony time rolls around.
And then there are the critics, who are all-powerful in the New York theater scene. We see glimpses of them dining together, and the portrait that emerges does not inspire hope for the future of theater criticism.
This stuff is diverting enough, although everything is so gee-whiz sparkly that the film sometimes plays like an unintentional parody, a la Christopher Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman.” Incidentally, if this movie is accurate, at least 90 percent of Broadway is totally gay.
“Show Business” skims the surface of this process, and doesn’t even get into the issue of how elite and exclusive the business of attending a Broadway show has become. Instead, we get the smell of the greasepaint and the lure of the footlights – which seems like only half the story.
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