‘SNL’ Wouldn’t Have Been the Same Without This Forgotten Musical

We all know Hamilton and Les Misérables and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s erotic feline fantasy confessional. But one 20th century musical that doesn’t get talked about much these days is Godspell, the revisionist, candy-colored take on the life of Jesus Christ.

The show was a big hit when it premiered in New York back in 1971, even spawning a big-screen adaptation just two years later. 

And now Godspell is the subject of a new documentary that just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival: 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).

The musical itself isn’t necessarily worthy of revisiting, but the Toronto production, which debuted in 1972, is renowned among comedy obsessives purely due to its cast, which included then-unknown twentysomethings like Gilda Radner, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin and Victor Garber. And the band featured a kid from Thunder Bay, Ontario named Paul Shaffer, who was hired by producers after showing up to help his friend audition.

Directed by Nick Davis, You Had to Be There is a very effective chronicle of this specific moment in comedy history. To its credit, the doc carves out space not just for those who went on to become major stars, but also the cast members who didn’t attain the same level showbusiness success, one we eventually learn, for shockingly harrowing reasons.

In addition to every surviving member of the cast, we also hear from younger comedy performers like Mike Myers, Janeane Garofalo and Saturday Night Live’s Heidi Gardner and James Austin Johnson. Early on, Lin-Manuel Miranda refers to the Toronto Godspell as the 1927 Yankees of comedy. 

If the doc has a thesis, it’s that this cast ended up sowing the seeds of modern comedy as we know it. And while that may sound like an exaggeration, Toronto’s Godspell inarguably helped birth two of the most influential comedy shows of the 20th century: SNL and SCTV.

Obviously much of the cast went on to star in SCTV (along with John Candy, who famously “hated” the show he wasn’t a part of), but also one of the Torontonians who went to see Godspell was a young Lorne Michaels. When Michaels began work on his NBC late-night show just a few years later, he immediately thought of Radner. “Gilda was the first person I hired,” Michaels once said. “I saw her in Godspell and she was unlike anyone else. She could make the smallest moment huge. I knew we’d build the show around her energy.” 

Michaels also hired Howard Shore, who played saxophone in Godspell, as musical director, who tapped Shaffer to join him. Because if there’s one thing Michaels is good at, it’s picking and choosing talent from pre-existing comedy ensembles.