You Had to Be There: Doc on a Godspell Production with a Soon-To-Be-Superstar Cast is a Tale of Echoes

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B+

“Video or it didn’t happen,” is a die-hard meme that defines the current generation’s attitude towards the past. By this standard, most things pre-smartphone didn’t happen.

You Had to Be There is a documentary – in theatres this week - about the 1972 Toronto production of Godspell, with its soon-to-be-famous young cast. In it, a point is made that live stage performances live only briefly in the moment (hence the title). It survives, if at all, essentially as oral history.

The soon-to-be-famous kids in Godspell

These days, that’s not always true. Productions from the Metropolitan Opera to Stratford to the U.K.’s National Theatre can be seen in a Cineplex.

But the ephemerality of live performance is still its charm. You Had to Be There is essentially the oral recounting of something the rest of us can never see. Other than the words of erstwhile cast members like Martin Short, Victor Garber, Dave Thomas, Jayne Eastwood, Andrea Martin and Eugene Levy, the only evidence (aside from reviews) of what went on at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre is some gawd-awful cassette audio of a performance that Short recorded illegally. Oh, and a little surprise at the end.

There is so little “there” there, that You Had to Be There kind of reminded me of the folktale of nail soup (or stone soup in some tellings) – in which a clever traveler promises to make a delicious soup out of water and a nail, with just a few touches of delicious “extras.”

Godspell itself is the nail. It is not the story. You won’t come away with much of an idea of what it was about. It certainly seems energetic, as befits a cast that would go on to define a generation of comedy. It is part of the “hippie Jesus” period of folk mass entertainment (as a kid, I once attended a mass in which the priest played the hilarious Herod’s Song from Jesus Christ Superstar and sermonized on it). For its part, Godspell was a hit on Broadway and inspired an earnest movie that flopped.

But the young stars it brought together in Toronto are the story, one that encompasses early Canadian cinema and TV, the explosion of Second City, the chance career choices of the Gilda Radners and Paul Shaffers and others who found themselves tied together in a production of loosely gospel-inspired characters in clown suits.

It has much in common with the recent heart-tugging doc Marty, Life is Short, and not just because Short plays such a big part here. You Had to Be There captures a moment in time when the coolest of comedic co-workers developed lifelong friendships, such that they had a rented clubhouse/flophouse at 1063 Avenue Road where they sparked up doobies and lit a creative fire that led to SCTV, Saturday Night Live and countless movies.

The doc directed by Nick Davis is kind of all over the place in that regard, much like the play, but it has a lot of places to go in 95 minutes.

But it is testament to the fact that you don’t need a video record for some things to survive. The fact that Judd Apatow signed on as executive producer shows the power of word-of-mouth over the decades. Anyone who embraces comedy history should know about that half-century-old Toronto event.

You Had to Be There provides a chance to experience the echoes of that event. You can’t be there without a time machine, but you can feel it reverberate.

You Had to Be There. Directed by Nick Davis, written by Nick Davis and Jane Mendelsohn. Stars Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber et al. Opens Friday, Oct. 2 at the TIFF Lightbox.