I'll spare you the nerve-racking suspense: "Broadway: The Golden Age" is a far better documentary than "Broadway: The American Musical", although the latter consists of a six-part, six-hour series, against the puny 1h51 minutes of The Golden Age. The reason that Golden Age is significantly better is that it focuses on performers' stories - not in great depth, of course, given the time allotted, but enough that one comes away with some names who have marked Broadway and salient facts about their lives, for instance Laurette Taylor and Kim Stanley. This makes the Golden Musical documentary much more engaging.
You'd think PBS would know a thing or two about story-telling, but the part of the documentary about the golden age of Broadway pales in comparison with its competitor. Instead, it is a kaleidoscopic collection of fragments with no thread. That was the first part I watched of the PBS series after seeing The Golden Age and I was extremely disappointed. But I then proceeded to watch the whole series from the beginning and obviously it does cover much more ground than "The Golden Age", with important asides on giants such as Rodgers and Hammerstein or Ethel Merman. So while an opportunity to make a truly landmark series was lost, the PBS series is definitely worth the purchase too.
In a different genre, The Teaching Company also offers a series of sixteen 45-minute videos on Great American Music: Broadway Musicals that is well worth watching too.
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