Blu-ray Review – Broadway: The American Musical

"Broadway: The American Musical" is a 2004 PBS series that endeavors to
compact a history of musical theater into a documentary that's a mere
six hours in length. It's quite a task considering the extensive list of
productions that have graced the heavily lit area, a few hanging around
for years after opening. Director Michael Kantor is ambitious, but
delightfully so, displaying unexpected confidence with his assembly of
industry highs and lows, using his secret weapon, host Julie Andrews, to
distract from a few gaps in the timeline. It's a colorful, tightly
edited series with a healthy sense of humor, a dash of backstage venom,
and a jubilant sense of Broadway expansion, bringing viewers into the
thick of the creativity that fuels these big shows, using interviews
with key industry players to carry the narrative along. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com