The premise of the documentary ShowBusiness is disarmingly simple: Broadway musicals all aspire to the granddaddy of all awards, the Tony for Best Musical; so let’s follow the mounting, premiere, and run of four of these shows, climaxing with the year-end Tony Awards. With any luck at all, at least one of our shows will win the Biggie!

And for a documentary with such a straightforward storyline, ShowBusiness—perhaps like a condensed season of American Idol, Project Runway, or Survivor—is remarkably infectious and effective. Director Dori Berinstein provides just the right mix of rehearsal and performance footage, backstage drama, awards program clips, and talking-head interviews with directors, producers, writers, critics, and performers, yielding a must-see hoot for anyone who has spent much time at all in theatre—musical or otherwise.

Will anyone else be fascinated? I’m not so sure. I was certainly skeptical enough going in, despite my past fifteen-plus years as a writer, producer, actor, and director. Musicals were never my favorite genre, and I feared that ShowBusiness would be an evangelistic piece proclaiming the merits of that particular theatrical artform. But Berinstein is enough of an enthusiast herself to know that theatre’s appeal is far more general, abstract, and powerful than any one particular genre. And she’s smart enough to show us that the art’s most intriguing personalities are not necessarily those on the stage.

The four shows that Berinstein follows from the 2003-2004 Broadway season are Avenue Q, the controversial nominally-gay-themed and potty-mouthed Muppet-inspired puppetry musical; Wicked, based on the premise that the Wicked Witch of the West never got to tell her side of the story; Taboo, the loosely autobiographical Boy George musical; and Caroline, or Change, a drama about one woman’s struggle with racial inequality prior to civil rights reforms.

While previous Tony award winner Tonya Pinkins, as the star of Caroline, is without a doubt one of Broadway’s magnetic personalities, some other surprises surface as the story progresses. In a Norman Lear sitcomish fashion, the Avenue Q music-and-lyrics team of Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx proves magnetically entertaining, for instance, and the prolific virtuoso Alan Cumming, who coproduced ShowBusiness, demonstrates why he’s such a fascinating dynamo. One even suspects that Caroline composer Jeanine Tesori would offer enough personality and energy to warrant an entirely separate documentary.

The biggest surprise in the film, though, is that Broadway’s critics would allow themselves to be filmed—and that they would voluntarily contribute to exposing themselves to be the shallow, irrelevant, self-important gatekeepers that they are. It’s easy enough here to see why they have become laughably infuriating real-life villains—and still, no one forced them to participate. Moreover, even on this score Berinstein exudes a certain affection.

For those not familiar with the business, though—particularly those who deliberately insulate themselves from artists and their foibles—ShowBusiness might come as something of a shock to the system. It might even turn such folk off from theatre entirely. As fascinating and as real as these artists might be, they’re not likely to be everyone’s cup of tea. They’re not the sort of people one typically finds at a church potluck, for instance.

Those who already feel a calling to the arts, though, are likely to feel warmly and happily at home. If you care about artists, I think you’ll care greatly about ShowBusiness.

ShowBusiness is rated PG for “language and some sexual references.” This is the rare case when I would recommend a stronger rating. I’m both a theatre enthusiast and veteran, but I would never dream of letting anyone younger than thirteen run around unattended backstage—and that’s essentially what this film represents. These are strong personalities we see in ShowBusiness, and young children are extremely impressionable.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of ShowBusiness.