Before Martin Short, Eugene Levy, and Gilda Radner helped reshape North American comedy, they were wearing overalls and singing together in a 1972 Toronto production of “Godspell.” The new documentary “You Had To Be There” revisits the remarkable theatrical production that launched several major careers and helped create the community that eventually fed into “Saturday Night Live,” “SCTV,” and much more.
Its wonderfully unwieldy full title is “You Had To Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (in a Canadian Kind of Way).”
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Directed by Nick Davis and written by Davis and Jane Mendelsohn, “You Had To Be There” brings the surviving cast members back together to recount how the production came about and what grew from it. Along with Short, Levy, and Radner, the original Toronto company included Victor Garber, Paul Shaffer, Andrea Martin, Jayne Eastwood, Avril Chown, Valda Aviks, Don Scardino, and Rudy Webb.
The documentary also puts that fertile moment in comedy history into a larger context through interviews with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mike Myers, Heidi Gardner, Gary Gulman, James Austin Johnson, Janeane Garofalo, Dave Thomas, and “Godspell” composer Stephen Schwartz.
The Toronto production arrived only a year after “Godspell” premiered Off-Broadway in 1971. While its young performers were hardly household names at the time, many would soon become foundational figures in modern comedy. Radner joined the original “Saturday Night Live” cast in 1975, while Short, Levy, and Martin became central members of the seminal Canadian sketch comedy show “SCTV.” Shaffer would eventually spend more than three decades as David Letterman’s musical director and sidekick.
The convergence was so unlikely that it has long carried the aura of comedy mythology: an inexpensive Canadian production of a religious musical somehow assembled several performers who would soon change television comedy. “You Had To Be There” looks at the friendships and creative community behind that story, rather than treating the production merely as an early-career curiosity.
Judd Apatow executive produces the documentary. “You Had To Be There” opens at New York’s Film Forum on September 18 before expanding to theaters nationwide on September 25. Watch the trailer below.
Edward Davis is a senior film journalist and longtime contributor to The Playlist. Davis covers the full breadth of cinema — from major studio releases to independent and international film.
