George M. Cohan ordered a dish of pistachio ice cream, lit a cigarette, and shifted his chair nearer the window that looked out on Central Park. "A musical show at the University, is that it?"

"Yes, Mr. Cohan. A musical biography. We've got an idea that your career would make an exciting evening in the theatre."

"Nothing exciting about it. Just ups and downs, and a lot of things to wise up on. I don't see where you'll get enough material to make a play. But if you want to try it, kid, go right ahead. I'll call Jerry Vogel in the morning and you can get the music from him."

Go right ahead! As casually as that we gained the right to tell, on the stage at Catholic University, what is probably the most colorful story in modern "show business". And with the ingratiating right-sided smile that accompanied George Cohan's injunction, the show called Yankee Doodle Boy was turned from wishful thinking into ten weeks of writing, revising, designing, rehearsing and final gratification.

What has "musical biography" to do with a University theatre, you ask? What place, in a season that ranges from Marlowe's Faustus to Moliere's Miser, has the "show business" which produced Forty-Five Minutes fom Broadway and Broadway Jones? To our way of thinking, a big one. Musical comedy is a valid theatrical form, in certain ways more genuinely "of the theatre" than many others; it is a living tradition. Too often the trained staffs of college producing units, doing the necessary and expert job of sustaining and revitalizing other traditions, dismiss this valuable property, relegating it to the extracurricular sphere and the social campus.

But to us Yankee Doodle Boy was too big for that. One of the functions of the tributary theatre—one of the services it can render a developing culture—lies in the recording and keeping alive of genuine Americana within its own boundaries. George M. Cohan has not only contributed to a consciously national theatre in this country, but has created large slices of it himself. He is no mere songand-dance man, in spite of his own protestations to the contrary; rather, as the citation read him by the University says, he brought a fresh concept of native types to our theatre when such self-assertion was woefully needed.

When Mr. Cohan forecast difficulties in making a show of his career, he was right; but in the wrong direction. There was far too much material. Spanning fifty-odd years of writing, composing, dancing, acting and producing, in the conventional two-and-one-half hours of performance, was a problem. And to this professional history we added two introductory scenes: one allegedly from the first year of our hero's life, and the other noting briefly his first and practically only respite from the theatre when, at the age of seven, he developed an aversion for schooling and a passion for baseball.

This matter of continuity was especially difficult. The first and second acts divided themselves rather too sharply into different stories. The first act was a dramatic "natural" with a sound predicate of character. Cohan tells this story best, with a mellow and sly self-deprecation, in the 1925 autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway—the story of an offensively aggressive adolescent who nearly ruins his family's chances for success before he is jolted into an awareness of his own shortcomings. It became, quite easily, a study in family fortunes, affections and minor dissensions—those of the Four Cohans—and provided far more narrative body than is given to most writers of musical comedy books. It was almost a play in itself, with a complete action and resolution.

The second act was another matter. A success story is exciting in the theatre, but when you multiply it thirty or forty times a five-minute montage will exhaust its interest values. And by the time the central figure had become an independent producer, the family story was over. Our devices for sustaining some kind of unity other than that of the principal character were not brilliant, but they sufficed. And for a final, nostalgic link with the earlier story, we seized upon the fact that the star had taken Ah, Wilderness! for a one-night stand to his home town, and played another scene on the baseball lot (now a filling station) of Act One. We had to change home towns to do it, but then, so did Cohan.

The edited script still called for more than twenty settings; the show had to move fast, and the stage of the University theatre is small. As a result, designer Ralph Brown adopted the wing-and-drop settings of the period in which Yankee Doodle Boy began, reinforced these by flat set pieces which could be mounted and stacked swiftly, applied a slight stylization with his brush that paralleled the formality of musical comedy technique and complemented the "billboard" or "poster" motif which had been set directorially.

As a further frank emphasis on the theatricality of the materials, the brick walls of the University theatre were reproduced in vividly colored distortion as theatre walls in the backstage scenes and, to tie the two together and retain a backstage atmosphere over such scenes as were played elsewhere, a false proscenium and leg drops in wing positions repeated the brick pattern. Thus the principal figures, whether in hotel rooms, Central Park, or lavish offices never escaped the brick-wall boundaries of their professional lives, which helped to unify the extensive action.

The music was a great help, if not our complete salvation. It was all Cohan—twenty-three of his best-known songs—and had an indestructible unity of its own. If one national weekly reported that the music "was worked into the script cleverly and strictly as part of the swift-moving story," the compliment is Cohan's, and not ours. Written as sure-fire "show music" in the first place, it still stages itself, constantly suggesting narrative treatment, and bursting with opportunities for business and production devices. With a single exception, every scene of the show had at least one song, and the opening spot of the second act—a panoramic arrangement of the star's first major hits on Broadway—had four. When you have a score that includes nearly two dozen items with the zest and melody of "Grand Old Flag," "Guess I'll have to Telegraph My Baby," "Harrigan," "So Long Mary," and "Give My Regards to Broadway," the battle is more than half over. Incidentally, we reintroduced Mr. Cohan to at least one song he professes to have forgotten completely.

The principals were fortunate in being able to meet Mr. Cohan and discuss their roles during the early rehearsal period. He executed dance steps, sang and chatted with them on every subject but himself—the one topic on which he is maddeningly, albeit charmingly, reticent. Aside from the autobiography, we were on our own as to research. George M. was not stacking any cards in his own favor.

For the third performance at Catholic University, the original Yankee Doodle Boy flew to Washington from New York and sat in a theatre so jammed that an offer of twenty dollars for a seat went unheeded before curtain time. For him, he said, it was a thrilling evening.