By George!
This is an off-beat, interesting TV production based on the musical George M!, about the life of George M. Cohan, that starred Joel Grey recreating the role that got him a Tony nomination. It’s not a direct adaptation of the musical, but a blend of the show and a backstage rehearsal, so it’s done fairly barebones and skims the story (especially since it’s also cut down to 75 minutes.)
It’s got a great cast, though, including Bernadette Peters who also recreates her role from Broadway as George’s sister Josie. And other members included Jack Cassidy, Nanette Fabray, Red Buttons, Blythe Danner, Anita Gillette (who I posted a 2016 video of the other day here, singing a number she'd performed in 1962 from Mr. President, Irving Berlin’s last musical), Jesse White and Lewis J. Stadlen (who played Groucho in Minnie’s Boys, the musical about the Marx Bros. Here, he plays the stage manager).
All the songs are by Cohan and are the highlight. It’s a bit surface, for the reasons noted, but well done. And for all the skimming, it’s probably closer to the true story than James Cagney’s Yankee Doodle Dandy, because it shows George’s pronounced go and the dark side of it that got in the way. There are two oddities in the production. The first is that though the score is wall-to-wall Cohan, it inexplicably leaves out one of his most famous songs, “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” The best I can figure is that this cuts off at the end, but before the final credits, and so perhaps like the Broadway show, this might have had a long medley at the end of many other Cohan songs, and maybe they included “You’re a Grand Old Flag” there. Or not. The oddity is the same one as in the Cagney movie – when they deal with the musical where Cohan made his successful comeback, I’d Rather Be Right, which was written by others, both this production and the movie leave out that the writers of this show were the renowned team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Why neither version leaves that out, I have no idea, especially since it’s very interesting. (Cohan had great jealousy and disdain for Rodgers & Hart – which is ignored in the movie, though dealt with here. In real life, not mentioned here, he would refer to them derisively as ‘Gilbert and Sullivan.”)
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