Featuring Carol Burnett, Shirley MacLaine, Stephen Sondheim, Kaye Ballard, Bea Arthur, Frank Langella and Uta Hagen. Rated general.

Theatre fanatics looking for a deep-dish look at historical nitty-gritty are not going to find it in Broadway: The Golden Age. The film's subtitle, By the Legends Who Were There, tells you all you need to know about filmmaker Rick McKay's breathless-buff approach. Billing himself, about two dozen times, as "a kid from Beech Grove, Indiana", McKay--on his own, with a camera and microphone--spent almost five years tracking down his heroes. The results, especially given the fact that so many of said legends have died since the movie went into the editing booth, turn out to be distinctly worthwhile.

Although McKay is plainly thrilled to meet anyone famous--Jeremy Irons discusses the "gold dust" of live performance and Alec Baldwin talks about, well, whatever Alec Baldwin talks about--the real old-timers get all the best lines. As you might figure, Carol Burnett is a loquacious guide to the heyday of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and she recounts how four roommates shared the same dress (carefully preserved for auditions). Dramatic veterans such as Julie Harris, Ben Gazzara, and Marian Seldes maintain their integrities well, while the musical stars constitute a virtual who's-who of abominable plastic surgery. The most-horrifying award is a split decision between the late Ann Miller, whose wax seems ready to drip, and Carol Channing, who appears to be the animatronic version of the caricature she started out to be.

The film is shamelessly nostalgic, but it earns its emotions by matching very apt stills and archival footage with just the right comments from the folks looking back. Jerry Orbach, now of Law & Order fame but then a singing hoofer, proves a sharp observer of the meet-you-at-Walgreens era, but Nanette Fabray scores points for honesty by declaring that she hated training at Juilliard "because it interfered with my nightclubbing".

At almost two hours, McKay's reverie might spend too much time lionizing Marlon Brando and Kim Stanley, but it also devotes valuable screen space to lesser-known lights--all told, he did almost 100 interviews. We get to hear not only about Shirley MacLaine's breakthrough while understudying the lead in The Pajama Game but about little-known Gretchen Wyler, who banked everything on someone else breaking a leg. The main benefit, though, goes to Laurette Taylor, an alcoholic stage actor unknown to film fans but apparently close to the hearts of every theatre maven over 50. The rare clip of her giving a screen test to David O. Selznick is a godsend, as are the recollections of people who saw her still-resonant performance in The Glass Menagerie. Maybe Jeremy Irons wasn't being smarmy about that gold dust after all.