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Showing posts from July, 2014

Born on the 3rd of July - George M. Cohan

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George M. Cohan overlooks Times Square The first lines of the musical George M! are "George who?" Indeed the George I write of today is no other than George M. Cohan Though he liked to claim July 4th as his birth, George most probably was born on the 3rd in Providence, RI. My first encounter with this song and dance man draped in red, white, and blue was my freshman year of high school. I was in the cast of the Park High's fall musical George M! The biographical musical from the 1967 Broadway season is a behemoth of Cohan story and musical material. It did a fair business on Broadway and starred Joel Grey as Cohan. In an odd turn of events, the Park edition of the show had a considerable amount of re-writes, clocked in at just over 3 hours. Not sure our audience was ready for that kind of time commitment. A guy named Mike played Cohan and I was the unofficial understudy- I did not know that until he was late to one of the performances. I think I wrote more about