‘Good God, It Was Fun!’ Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Dick Van Dyke, and more legends of Broadway reprise their most memorable characters.

Photographs by Mark Seliger

Interviews by Rebecca Alter, Julia Edelstein, Jason P. Frank, Rachel Handler, Devon Ivie, Molly Langmuir, Jackson McHenry, Mary Melton, Zach Schiffman, and Matthew Schneier

t’s here and then it’s gone. When the run of a play or musical ends, that’s it. If you’re a movie or TV aficionado, you can always make your way back through the canon to catch up. Theatergoers make do with fragments: cast albums, the tiny percentage of shows that were filmed for television, a fuzzy YouTube clip if they’re lucky, and whatever the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts caught on tape. Plus, of course, revivals.

Much of this art form, instead, is retained in living memory, and that is finite. For example: Many performers who came up in the 1940s said that the greatest actor to ever walk onstage was Laurette Taylor, especially in The Glass Menagerie. And I hear many of you saying, “Who?” She exists almost solely in the minds of that generation, because the only filmed record of her work from the sound era is just a couple of minutes long — a screen test for a movie she didn’t end up doing. There’s barely anything else for us to see. When everyone who watched her perform is gone, the rest of us will have to take her greatness on faith.

For our annual “Yesteryear” issue, we asked 29 Broadway legends to pose before Mark Seliger’s camera and revisit their most memorable roles. Their careers span an enormous length of time, through multiple Broadway eras. Barbra Streisand (in Funny Girl) and Dick Van Dyke (in Bye Bye Birdie) came out of the late-golden-age productions of the 1960s. Others, like Donna McKechnie (in A Chorus Line), are from shows that carried the torch through the diminished Times Square of the ’70s. Betty Buckley, Patti LuPone, and Lea Salonga stepped into their wardrobes from the Lloyd Webber–ian British-invasion years, and Lin-Manuel Miranda and Idina Menzel recalled their arrival during Broadway’s millennial reinvention of itself. Some of these performances were career breakthroughs, turning working-stiff actors into above-the-title stars. Others were simply definitive, astonishing audiences or winning Tony Awards or creating a character that everyone knows to this day. All were roles these actors felt strongly about and were eager to inhabit in the studio. It’s likely the only time you’ll ever see most of them return to these characters. This portfolio is, like a memory of a night in a Broadway house, an artifact of a moment. — Christopher Bonanos

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