YOU’RE A GRAND NEW BOOK (AND GRAND OLD CAST ALBUM) By Peter Filichia
YOU’RE A GRAND NEW BOOK (AND GRAND OLD CAST ALBUM)
By Peter Filichia
He died 82 years ago this week, but here’s proof that he hasn’t been forgotten.
Elizabeth T. Craft’s excellent new book YANKEE DOODLE DANDY may get you to play your GEORGE M! original cast album, either for some additional times or for the first time since its 1968 release.
That’s GEORGE M! as in Cohan, once dubbed “The Man Who Owned Broadway.” One can see why just from Craft’s pointing out that “the word ‘Broadway’ itself appears in four of his show’s titles and over a dozen of his songs.”
If you’re trying to name some of those, what will probably first come to mind is “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Cohan wrote it in 1904, but, as Craft reports, even in 2016, Patti LuPone didn’t feel it was too antiquated when she sang it at an event involving HAMILTON.
Never mind that Cohan’s music sounds nothing like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s. There’s a good chance that as long as there’s a Broadway, there’ll be “Give My Regards to Broadway.”
And as long as the song is sung, the long-archaic word “ere” will not be put to rest. You can infer from Cohan’s last line – “I’ll be there ere long” – that it means “before.” However, when Lynn Ahrens was writing RAGTIME – set only a few years after Cohan wrote his best-known song – she didn’t have Mother sing that she and her husband could never go “Back to Ere.”
Despite this word that could have been a verbal Achilles’ heel to the song’s longevity, it’s the Cohan song that has best withstood the test of time. No wonder that librettist Michael Stewart positioned it as Joel Grey’s Act One closer in GEORGE M! Any song would find it a tough act to follow. Better to have an intermission where people could hum, sing or savor it.
So why didn’t Craft use that song title as the name of her book instead of YANKEE DOODLE DANDY? For that matter, “Yankee Doodle Dandy” isn’t even the actual name of the song that uses those words in its first line. Sheet music will inform you that its official title is “Yankee Doodle Boy,” in honor of those words in its last line.
One reason, of course, is that YANKEE DOODLE DANDY was the title of Cohan’s 1942 biopic, to which Craft devotes a generous 15 pages.
However, Craft makes a cogent observation when she says that both songs “hardly seem to have been composed; they just seem to have always existed.”
Each, by the way, comes from LITTLE JOHNNY JONES, a 1904 opus which was revived on Broadway in 1982. It might have stood a chance if its leading man hadn’t been Donny Osmond. But he was, and one official performance is all it could muster.
GEORGE M! made room for two more of Cohan’s songs that celebrated the 33-mile street. “All Aboard for Broadway” is in fact Grey’s first number when he’s part of The Four Cohans. (Craft gives us a fun fact: The Cohan Family Mirth Makers was the troupe’s original name.)
“All Aboard for Broadway” comes from GEORGE WASHINGTON, JR., a 1906 musical. Craft reveals that it was sympathetic to the African American cause, although its language today seems more than a tad clumsy.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, JR. was the second 1906 musical that Cohan brought to Broadway. He didn’t wait long to open his first one that year, for FORTY-FIVE MINUTES FROM BROADWAY debuted six weeks earlier on New Year’s Day (and stayed around until St. Patrick’s Day).
Compare that to the length of time that today’s musicals take to open.
You’ll get even more depressed when you hear that later that year, Cohan opened a third musical: THE GOVERNOR’S SON in June; GEORGE M! took a song from this one, too: “Push Me Along in My Pushcart.”
And if those three weren’t enough, in October, Cohan opened POPULARITY, his first non-musical comedy. Craft admits that it was a flop – 24 performances was all it could muster – but Cohan wasn’t discouraged enough to take off the rest of 1906. He brought back FORTY-FIVE MINUTES FROM BROADWAY on Nov. 5 – not knowing, of course, that it would be the day of his death 36 years later.
On the other hand, as Craft informs us, FORTY-FIVE MINUTES FROM BROADWAY contained only five songs. So having fewer tunes may be one reason why Cohan could churn out shows so quickly.
Similarly speaking, Craft tells us that Cohan’s 1911 opus THE LITTLE MILLIONAIRE had a second act with no songs at all. But one that did appear in Act One became the opening song of GEORGE M!: “Musical Moon,” sung by Cohan’s parents.
Craft also reports that THE LITTLE MILLIONAIRE also had a song called “Oh, You Wonderful Girl,” which got a sex-change for GEORGE M! It became “Oh, You Wonderful Boy” in the Broadway musical debut of a soon-to-be star: Bernadette Peters. So, the cast album gives you a chance to hear the future legend in her early days.
Stewart also included a scene where Cohan writes a title song for FORTY-FIVE MINUTES FROM BROADWAY. We hear Joel Grey sing it before he sends it off to Fay Templeton, a big star at the time who’d already had 14 Broadway credits to her name.
The voice that then follows Grey’s on the Grammy-nominated album is Loni Ackerman’s. No, she didn’t play Templeton, but her maid Rose. Stewart wrote that Templeton wasn’t initially inclined to do Cohan’s show, but Rose loved “Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway” so much and sang it while working so often that Templeton came around.
If this actually happened, Craft missed it. Considering the depth she plumbs in nearly 300 pages, you may guess that Stewart was taking liberties with the truth.
(Listening to the song, though, we can understand why Rose and Templeton would like it.)
Craft also reveals a surprise about one of the best numbers in GEORGE M!: “Twentieth Century Love.” Wouldn’t you assume that Cohan wrote this soon after the turn of the century? No: 1927 was the year when Cohan got around to writing it, ostensibly for THE MERRY MALONES, although it didn’t make the cut.
GEORGE M!, in fact, was the first time Broadway heard it – as well as the title song from THE MUSICAL COMEDY MAN, the show on which Cohan was working just before he died.
Finally, Craft adds an epilogue, in which she notes that GEORGE M! was strong enough to last a year at a time when patriotism – a dominant Cohan theme – was at an all-time low. (The musical actually opened on the very day that the recently assassinated Martin Luther King was buried.) And yet, Craft finds a way to bring her book to a close on an optimistic note.
So, while you give you regards to GEORGE M!, also give them to Elizabeth T. Craft’s YANKEE DOODLE DANDY.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His new day-by-day wall calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY – 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
