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Fi aker lc ae
cap*res the world o f
A merican musicals

in PBS special

DIANA LIEBERMAN

Special to the Jewish News

91

Carol Channing
in "Hello, Dolly,"
1964: The show
was '!saved"
hi Detroit.

a very large extent, the PBS series Broadway: The
American Musical is a reflection of the mind of Michael

,0

Kantor, producer, director and one of the major Nv ri ter
of the six-part series, which airs Oct. 19-21 on public television
stations across the country.
"I got the theater bug in college," says Kantor, 43. Raised in New
Haven, Conn., where his father was a physician teaching at Yale
University, the filmmaker earned a bachelor's degree in theater stud-
ies from Cornell University and a master of fine arts in directing from
the University of California, San Diego.
"But I really wasn't interested in commercial television, commercial
movies," he says.
In the mid-1980s, he was directing live theater in New York City when
a friend was hired to make a television documentary about aviator/writer
Charles Lindbergh. "I'd done a theater piece on Lindbergh and thought it
Nvould be great to learn to make a film as well," Kantor remembers.

BROADWAY Ma.01)Y on page 72

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