The Royce Files

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 ...

Thanks to DJ Segue tweeting this great Flash movie. Very clever and entertaining. Here it is . It has few similarities to one of my favorite YouTube animations. On another note, for those of you looking for a clip from Par Ki's George M! from 20 years ago, I can't find the tape. In fact I could not find any tapes of the musicals. A shame. There are so few clips of scenes from George M! out there.

The Par Ki musical of 1989 was George M! Pictured are Lynette, Mike, Rachel, and Peter. They possibly don't recollect ever being in this show. It's been 20 years since the production since the Par Ki production of George M! Can you believe it? Well, no. It's a rather forgettable show. However, old Georgie was the last of the great big D.O. productions. Yeah, he did do 42nd Street the following year but the production values of that show were vastly different than the epic George M! and had a different production staff. That was D.O's swan song. George M! was his War and Peace. George M! weighed in at just a smidgen under 3 hours as I recall. Ok maybe more like 2 and some change. But this was a monstrous musical in which much of the book was re-written or added on to to make it a somewhat coherent bio-musical of George M. Cohan. Out of the gate George M! was not that great a musical. It hardly garnered any plaudits in its Broadway run in the late 1960's. Joel Gr...