Before Martin Short, Eugene Levy and Gilda Radner became comedy fixtures, they shared a stage in Toronto in a 1972 production of “Godspell.” A new documentary argues that the 14-month run did more than launch careers: the friendships, improvisation and ensemble spirit formed there helped shape the comedy that followed on “SCTV” and “Saturday Night Live.”
“You Had to Be There,” directed by Nick Davis, plays the Coral Gables Art Cinema from Friday, Oct. 9, through Monday, Oct. 12, with screenings each day at 3 and 5:15 p.m. The nonprofit cinema is at 260 Aragon Ave. Tickets are $8 for members and $12.75 for nonmembers.
Davis co-wrote the 98-minute film with Jane Mendelsohn. Judd Apatow is an executive producer, and Greenwich Entertainment is distributing it. The full title is a mouthful: “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 film premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, where it finished second runner-up for the People’s Choice Documentary Award. It opened in New York on Sept. 18 before expanding across the country.
A cast before they were famous
The production at the center of the story opened June 1, 1972, at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre and ran for more than a year. Its company included Short, Levy, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas, Gilda Radner and Victor Garber, who played Jesus. Paul Shaffer, later David Letterman’s longtime bandleader, served as musical director.
The concentration of future talent was remarkable. Radner would become the first performer cast on “Saturday Night Live.” Levy, Thomas and Martin became central figures in “SCTV,” with Short joining the program later. Garber went on to play Jesus in the 1973 film version of “Godspell.”
“Godspell,” with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by John-Michael Tebelak, retells the Gospel of Matthew through a troupe of hippie clowns. Its loose structure left plenty of room for improvisation, and the Toronto company used it.
The documentary also returns to the late-night parties and gatherings surrounding the cast, including the Avenue Road apartment shared by Levy and Short. Long before most of them were famous, a circle of young performers was finding one another.
Reconstructing a show that nearly disappeared
Davis faced an obvious problem in telling the story: almost no footage of the stage production survives.
One of his most valuable sources came from Short himself.
During a performance, Short secretly placed a microphone and tape deck onstage and recorded the show. Davis uses that clandestine audio in the documentary, pairing it with retro-style animation to recreate moments for which no footage exists.
The film also gathers new interviews with surviving cast members, including Short, Levy, Garber, Martin, Shaffer, Thomas, Jayne Eastwood, Valda Aviks, Avril Chown, Don Scardino and Rudy Webb. Mike Myers and Lin-Manuel Miranda also appear, discussing the production and its influence. Late in the film, cast members react to previously unseen footage Davis tracked down.
That gives “You Had to Be There” something more immediate than a conventional retrospective. Instead of simply asking successful performers to remember what happened more than half a century ago, Davis lets them hear and see pieces of their younger selves.
Before ‘SNL’ and ‘SCTV’
Critics have responded warmly. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman wrote that the film is about “Godspell” but also about something larger, a cultural moment whose comic energy seemed to be gathering almost unnoticed. RogerEbert.com described it as coming close to fulfilling a comedy fan’s time-machine fantasy: traveling back to Toronto in 1972 to see the show.
Part of the documentary’s pleasure comes from knowing what the young performers themselves could not: who they were about to become.
Short had initially studied toward a medical career. Levy, who grew up with him in Hamilton, Ontario, recalls a world in which becoming an actor hardly seemed like an obvious path. The film catches the group before “SNL,” before “SCTV,” before Letterman and before decades of movies and television made their faces familiar.
Davis spends less time mapping every branch of the production’s influence than capturing the group itself: young performers finding one another, improvising together, putting on a show and building friendships without knowing where any of it would lead.
More than 50 years later, that may be the story’s greatest charm.
The Coral Gables Art Cinema opened in October 2010 and presents independent, international and classic films along with documentaries and special programs. “You Had to Be There” runs for four days. For viewers raised on “SNL” and “SCTV,” it offers an origin story told largely by the people who lived it. For those who have never seen “Godspell,” the film starts far enough back that they do not need to know the musical to understand why this particular production mattered.
