Curious George

Goodspeed stumbles in the Cohan biography

by Steve Vineberg

GEORGE M!

Book by Michael Stewart and John and Francine Pascal. Music and lyrics by George M. Cohan. Directed by Greg Ganakas. Choreographed by Randy Skinner. Musical direction by Michael O'Flaherty. Sets designed by Howard Jones. Costumes by John Carver Sullivan. Lighting by Kirk Bookman. With John Scherer, Frank Root, Dorothy Stanley, Liz Pearce, Jennifer Smith, Tia Speros, Jennifer Goode, and Dale Hensley. At the Goodspeed Opera House, East Haddam, Connecticut, through October 7.

The main problem with George M!, the 1968 show currently in revival at the Goodspeed Opera House, is Yankee Doodle Dandy. Michael Curtiz's 1942 musical biography of Cohan -- the vaudevillian turned actor-playwright-songwriter who wrote 21 Broadway musicals between 1901 and 1928 and starred in nine of them -- is sentimental and heavily fictionalized, and Jimmy Cagney, whose performance won him an Oscar, is nothing at all like the real Cohan. (You can hear Cohan himself on old recordings, and Turner occasionally screens his only movie, The Phantom President.) But Yankee Doodle Dandy is nonetheless a sensational piece of entertainment, and George M! offers virtually nothing that the movie didn't do better, including the episode about how the brash showman's persistence wore down the celebrated ingenue Fay Templeton's objections to appearing in 45 Minutes from Broadway and the story of Cohan's comeback in the role of FDR in the Rodgers & Hart musical I'd Rather Be Right. Michael Stewart and John and Francine Pascal, the book writers, even reproduce the identical section of Little Johnny Jones, the show that put Cohan on the map in 1904 -- and considering that no one who's ever seen Yankee Doodle Dandy is likely to have forgotten it, that's asking for trouble.

Still, George M! ran for over a year on Broadway, no doubt because of Joel Grey in the title role. (Bernadette Peters was in it, too, as his sister Josie; it was her first Broadway show.) And though I never saw Grey play it, it's easy to imagine him fleshing out the character that the writing, thin as onion skin, barely provides: a self-absorbed hothead, driven by ambition and workaholism, who alienates almost everyone close to him. But as John Scherer plays Cohan in the Goodspeed production, he never seems remotely driven, just unpleasant. Scherer is a highly competent singer and dancer who knows how to take the stage, but he seems wrong for the role in almost every possible way. For one thing -- to state the obvious -- he's too tall. It's no coincidence that Jimmy Cagney and Joel Grey share a diminutive stature: Cohan's most famous part, after all, was as a jockey in a musical called Little Johnny Jones.

It's fun to hear the Cohan songs again -- not only the famous ones like "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "Over There" and "45 Minutes from Broadway," but also lesser-known ones like "Twentieth Century Love" and "A Ring to the Name of Rose." They're certainly well sung here, especially by Liz Pearce as Josie, Tia Speros as Cohan's second wife, the self-effacing Agnes Nolan, and Jennifer Goode as Fay Templeton. But the show, directed by Greg Ganakas (who supervised a spirited mounting of The Pajama Game at Goodspeed a couple of years ago), is mostly a drag. The story begins by telescoping the vaudeville career George had with his parents (Frank Root and Dorothy Stanley) and his sister -- they were billed as The Four Cohans -- and we get far too many lackluster numbers before they manage to ascend to the Great White Way. Pearce's Josie has a strong enough personality to transcend this dull opening section, but neither Root nor Stanley makes much of an impression, though, to be fair, their roles are woefully underwritten. Stewart and the Pascals make Georgie insufferable, but they seem to think we'll take his solid relationships with his family members for granted -- and that we won't want to know more about what went wrong with his marriage to Ethel Levey (Jennifer Smith) or how Agnes succeeded in putting up with him when Ethel couldn't. Without any compelling details, or any compelling characters besides George himself, the show seems to wash away even as you watch it.

The most successful elements in Ganakas's production are visual. Howard Jones's sets are often clever (especially in the "Twentieth Century Love" number), and John Carver Sullivan does a lovely job with the period costumes, which span four decades. Kirk Bookman's lighting is spectacular -- flamboyant in the best sense, lending the vaudeville sequences a fantastical, Turkish-delight quality and then moving into a grittier palette that you might envision for a revival of Gypsy or Chicago. And some of Randy Skinner's choreography for this tap-heavy musical is excellent: the dance highlights are "Popularity" in the first act and, appropriately, "Yankee Doodle Dandy" in the second. I wish, though, that he didn't wait so long to haul out his best ideas. "Popularity" is the penultimate number in act one, and by the time it came around I definitely needed rousing.