Drag queens imitate Carol Channing, so to see the bizarro Hello Dolly diva turn the tables and channel early-20th-century drama queen Lynn Fontanne—“It’s your dyoooooteh to take your show to the praaaaahvinces”—is to feel a mild sense of dislocation. But then, Rick McKay’s no-budget, no-frills docu-homage, Broadway: The Golden Age, is all about dislocation: It wants to take viewers back to a time when theater mattered, more or less. Affable, warm, personal, and utterly unpretentious (no Burnsian pan-and-scan excesses here), Golden Age sits down to chat with what feels like everyone who’s ever been anyone in the American commercial theater—Elaine Stritch, Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury, Jerry Orbach, and a couple score more—and it slots their heyday-of-Broadway recollections into something like half a dozen segments organized loosely by theme. Fresh-Off-the-Bus Mistakes, Stupid Starving-Artist Tricks, How I Got My Big Break, and the Performance I’ll Never Forget are just some of the topics that get the talky treatment. Archival footage, some of it deliciously rare, rounds out the picture, and what’s just as delightful for genuine stage junkies are reminiscences from a host of less-recognizable (but certifiably classy) names, along with the chance to put faces with ’em: Kim Stanley (Bus Stop), Tammy Grimes (the Unsinkable Molly Brown star who passed on Bewitched), even Silk Stockings lead Gretchen Wyler (a notable case, along with Shirley MacLaine, of Understudy Makes Good). And then there’s Laurette Taylor, the stage legend whose long shadow everyone here stands in: The originator of The Glass Menagerie’s Amanda Wingfield, she’s captured here mostly in other performers’ memories, though there are a few astonishing moments from her one-and-only sound film appearance—a screen test that demonstrates her gift for absolute naturalism. This is decidedly not an intro-to-theater film: To understand its low-key glory, you’ve gotta get why Julie Harris would mist up at the thought of a gesture Ethel Waters made, ages ago, in a performance of Mamba’s Daughters. Of course, that’s what’s really golden about great theater—not whatever starry era it was made in, but that rare magic that can make a wisp of a moment last forever in memory. —Trey Graham