Before he began interviewing Broadway performers, Rick McKay sang in cabarets and on cruise ships; he also produced segments about the arts on television station WNET (channel 13), among other TV projects. It seemed inevitable that McKay, with the heart of a historian, would 
eventually seek to make the documentary, Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There, released in 2004.
But the road to that now iconic film began on August 30, 1955 when Richard Charles McKay was born in a Boston suburb, soon after moving with his family to Beech Grove, near Indianapolis. Growing up there, McKay was active in musical theater and after graduating from high school taught at the Indiana School for the Deaf. He moved to Boston and then lived in Japan, where he was an English teacher and nightclub singer. He arrived in New York City in the early 1980s, and worked in cabaret and cruise ships, before turning to broadcast journalism.
His first foray into documentary filmmaking was Birds of a Feather, an inspiration for Mike Nichols during production on The Birdcage. McKay later worked in television, producing several acclaimed shows including 
WNET13’s “City Arts,” PBS’s “EGG, the Arts Show,” and the Biography series on the A&E network. He also supplied footage and received a director’s credit for the 2002 film Elaine Stritch at Liberty. Among his other activities, McKay shared Verdon and Michael Kidd video and transcripts with John Gilvey for a biography on Verdon, provided footage for his friend Barbara Cook’s memorial and created a film to celebrate composer Ervin Drake’s 90th birthday.
For Broadway: The Golden Age he recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with dozens of actors about their recollections of New York theater. It began when he persuaded Bea Arthur to let him interview her at her home in the mid-1990s. McKay had already produced Behind the Curtain: Broadway’s Living Legends. Subsequently, 
he used Arthur’s connections and those of his own friends to interview more celebrities, a long list that included Julie Harris, Stephen Sondheim, Ben Gazzara, Elaine Stritch, Carol Burnett, Diahann Carroll, Alec Baldwin and Shirley MacLaine. In addition to the interviews, McKay also searched for archival footage for the film.
At his sudden death in January 2018, McKay was working on two sequels of Broadway the Golden Age, which have been completed and released. Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age, chronicles the Great White Way from 1959 to 1981 and Broadway: The Next Generation, brings the story up to the present.
At the time of his death McKay was survived by four sisters, Stacie Stevenson and Sandy, Hope and Linda McKay, and a brother, Stephen.
