Parenting & Family Quote by James Broughton

There is a kind of origin-story swagger in the way Broughton stacks the genres: "Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies" reads like a roll call of popular pleasures before "theater" becomes the umbrella that sanctifies them. The list isn’t just inventory; it’s a declaration of catholic taste. He’s not distinguishing high art from low, not sorting ballet from burlesque. He’s saying the whole messy, glittering apparatus of performance got him first.

The key phrase is "everything that went on in a theater". Not "the plays", not "the actors", but the total event: spectacle, bodies, timing, applause, failure, improvisation. It’s a child’s perspective, but also a director’s: the person who later has to think about entrances, lighting, rhythm, and the weird chemistry between audience and stage. Broughton frames his sensibility as fundamentally composite, born from a room where multiple art forms collide and contaminate each other.

Context matters. Broughton comes out of the 20th century’s churn, when cinema didn’t replace live performance so much as cannibalize it and get haunted by it. Vaudeville fed early film; film borrowed theatrical staging; modern dance pushed narrative into abstraction. His quote quietly rejects the prestige hierarchy that would tell you movies are "modern" and vaudeville is "obsolete". The subtext is an aesthetic permission slip: if you love the theater as a total machine, you’re allowed to make work that’s hybrid, playful, and unembarrassed about delight.