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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to Broadway Nation, the podcast that explores the remarkable history of the Broadway musical with a particular focus on the immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artist who invented it. I'm David Armstrong, and this is the second of a three-part conversation with author Elizabeth T. Craft regarding her recent book, Yankee Doodle Dandy, George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage, which is the first book about Cohan in 50 years. If you missed the first episode in this series, you may want to catch up with that one before listening to this one. If you're a fan of Broadway Nation, I invite you to join such long-time patrons as Anne Welsh, whose generous support helps to make this podcast possible.

If you're interested, there'll be information at the end of the episode about how you, too, can become a patron. This week, Elizabeth and I begin with a discussion of Cohan the Entertainer. Cohan was without a doubt one of the first brand-name celebrities in the modern sense, and every aspect of his persona was perfectly integrated. His unique style of performance, the content of his plays and lyrics, the beat and rhythm of his music, all of it worked together in perfect unison. But what exactly was it that made Cohan such a distinctive and potent personality?

[1:22] Elizabeth T. Craft: It's a great question. You read reviews and they're saying, it's so Cohanesque, it's so Cohanian, they're so Cohanian. It's like they couldn't describe it, they just needed to use Cohan's words because he was so unique, so inimitable. But I think we can identify some principles that govern Cohan's work. His work as a playwright tended to use real-life characters who spoke in everyday dialogue. They increasingly emphasized the plot, as we've talked about. These were shows that hung together and told a cohesive story. Often a melodramatic, in the positive term of that, an eventful story with a lot of suspense to it and a lot of what's going to happen next.

[2:03] David Armstrong: Yes, a lot of mistaken identity, a lot of who stole the will, what's it going to turn out to be, a lot of romance. A lot happened in Cohan's shows.

[2:12] Elizabeth T. Craft: And sort of like this cross between farce and melodrama. In so many aspects of what he does, he synthesizes things. He's bringing disparate things together to give them impact.

[2:23] David Armstrong: Yes. We think of it as musical comedy. He's sometimes called the father of musical comedy. But he did bring in elements from melodrama, elements from all of these different realms to create something that is new. Critics said, we don't have a name for this. It's like there's some vaudeville and some melodrama, but that was actually what became Cohanian about it. That is what worked about it. Bringing together these different elements, that's what worked about it. The pacing was another Cohan trademark thing. It had to be fast. Speed, speed, speed, he said. And since he was a director as well as a playwright, he could make sure that happened in the staging.

[3:03] Elizabeth T. Craft: And he was quite famous for this. In fact, in his own writing, he had a speech where he's talking to the cast before a show, giving them the pep talk before the show. And it's all about speed, speed, speed. I wish I had it in front of me because I quoted it exactly in the script for Yankee Doodle Dandy. His first show in 1901, his first Broadway show. Ladies and gentlemen, don't wait for laughs. Sidestep encores. Crash right through this show tonight. Speed, speed, and lots of it. That's my idea of the thing. Perpetual motion. Laugh your heads off. Have a good time. Keep happy. Remember now. Happy, happy, happy. Do you all understand? And don't forget the secret to it all. Speed. A whole lot of speed.

[3:37] David Armstrong: Amazing. And of course, George Abbott will be credited with that idea 30 years later. That happens a lot with Cohan, where we forget that other people are credited with the innovations.

[3:48] Elizabeth T. Craft: I don't know that Cohan was the very first either. There's always, it's hard to say first, right? But Cohan was doing speed before Abbott. Cohan was doing integration, this big musical theatrical ideal that Rodgers and Hammerstein were for a long time given all the credit for with Oklahoma.

[4:04] David Armstrong: Cohan was trying to do it, and critics were commenting on the way that he was integrating music and plot and all of the different elements to create this cohesive show. But he was kind of forgotten and not given the credit.

[4:17] Elizabeth T. Craft: What else is this brand? What is the other parts that make him the definitive entertainer?

[4:22] Elizabeth T. Craft: Another big one is his use of self-referential or meta-theatrical devices. He would comment on the fact that it is a play. The characters would say things like, the way the author has mixed things up in this play up to now, it wouldn't surprise me if the heroine jumped into the orchestra pit and married the trombone player. What does the author think he's doing? And this kind of humor we see in later shows, when I saw these Cohan scripts, I thought this seems just like 21st century shows.

[4:53] David Armstrong: Seems like the Book of Mormon, yeah.

[4:55] Elizabeth T. Craft: Like the Book of Mormon, exactly. We think of this as sort of a postmodern kind of take on things, and here he's doing it at the turn of the century.

[5:05] David Armstrong: Yes, and people, that was one of his trademarks in his plays, in his musicals, in his reviews.

[5:11] Elizabeth T. Craft: Absolutely. And in big theatrical, bold ways. I know in his play, Seven Keys to Ballplate, it actually has a final turn where the whole thing has been the writer. Everything we saw up to that point was actually something the writer was just writing. None of it actually happened.

[5:27] David Armstrong: Yes, he was experimental in that way, and that was something that the critics eventually kind of came around because his plays were doing really interesting things like that.

[5:36] Elizabeth T. Craft: Yeah, fascinating.

[5:37] Elizabeth T. Craft: He has a show called The Royal Vagabond that someone else wrote, but he helped rewrite or doctor. That's kind of a spoof on this kind of commentary on the operetta. So he loved to poke fun at the conventions of the genre. If you wanted to be critical, you might say he's still using these clichés. He's just commenting on them to make it seem less cheesy. But audiences loved it.

[6:01] David Armstrong: He gets to have it both ways, which is very smart.

[6:04] Elizabeth T. Craft: Exactly. Have his cake and eat it, too.

[6:07] David Armstrong: I think about the song Musical Moon, which is one of my favorite of his lyrics, where he talks about Musical Moon. They sing about it in every musical show. I can't remember the lyric exactly, but it's self-referencing in this way.

[6:20] Elizabeth T. Craft: That good old musical moon That they sing about in every tune Never wearing out Painted on the scenery of a musical play Honeymoon, honeymoon Always gets the money moon Musical moon That rhymes with spoon and tune and loon Every first-class singing girl and boy From Tetrazzini to Daddy-Foy Every one of them bursting with joy They've been beating that musical moon It's been a good old moon for Andrew Mack Nora Bayes and her husband Jack A thousand others of them take a crack At that good old musical moon.

[7:14] David Armstrong: And yet, that's one of his most delightful songs. You can't help but tap your toe to that song, even as he's saying it. You've heard this song a thousand times before.

[7:22] Elizabeth T. Craft: Musical moon That rhymes with spoon and tune and loon Even if outside is tin below You'll still feel a warmth and glow No, you're gonna see your kinder show When you see that gleaming old moon When you see that gleaming old moon.

[7:52] David Armstrong: That's a great example. He has another one called That Haunting Melody, where the whole song is about this melody and how it's driving the listener insane. It's about an earworm. So this extended beyond his playwriting to also his songwriting, and even to his writings, his autobiography and his writings for newspapers, I feel like you would make these kind of gestures of commenting on the construction of the piece, the nature of the genre in humorous ways. It is funny. It makes it fun to read or to watch or to listen to.

[8:21] Elizabeth T. Craft: Absolutely. Cohan himself described his second musical, which is 45 Minutes from Broadway, and this is a show he did not appear in. It was written for Faye Templeton, who was a big star of the day. He described it as the best thing I've ever done. Why do you think that was his opinion? You had a chance to read it. Do you agree with him?

[8:41] Elizabeth T. Craft: Well, it made him a lot of money for one. And for Cohan, what made him a lot of money was probably the best. It was one that could be easily played. It was a relatively small show. This was a play with music, not a big, splashy musical comedy.

[8:56] David Armstrong: And it's weird in that aspect because there's three acts, I think, and the second act doesn't have any songs in it.

[9:01] Elizabeth T. Craft: Yes, that was a Cohan thing. So it only has a handful of songs. They're not spread evenly among the acts. It takes place in New Rochelle, New York, in the small town setting, 45 Minutes from Broadway. And it is a story that's very influenced by melodrama. This New Yorker has come to receive his inheritance from the wealthy character, Mr. Castleton, and his quirky secretary, Kid Burns, has come with him. Kid Burns is one of these characters who speaks in funny ways. He has a kind of cidified, slangy language. They discover that there's a rumor that the will was supposed to go to the housemaid, Mary Jane. Long story short, Kid Burns and Mary Jane fall in love. Kid Burns finds the real will that will disinherit his friend and faces the moral dilemma of what to do.

In the end, he does show Mary Jane the will. He's fallen in love with her. And because it was the 19 aughts and a wealthy woman couldn't marry someone like him, but she wants to be with him, she tears up the will at the final act so that love can prevail.

[10:05] David Armstrong: I don't know if I agree that it's his best. Maybe not for today's audiences who, you know, people like me think, well, why? Why can't she have the money and the man? But I can certainly see why he said it. It wasn't a flashy show. It went against the expectations of the time being about these normal everyday characters, the housemaid, the secretary. You're really rooting for them. And Cohan wrote some very effective stage business and very effective songs to support the story. Mary's a Grand Old Name, which is a Cohan favorite. And So Long, Mary, which I've often seen as a precursor to Hello, Dolly.

[10:43] Elizabeth T. Craft: That is a great observation. I love that.

[11:05] ♪ Musical number: "So Long, Mary" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[11:51] Elizabeth T. Craft: It's the exact same song, just flipped from So Long to Hello.

[11:54] David Armstrong: It is. That's great.

[11:56] Elizabeth T. Craft: Sung at the train station. Trains were a big deal.

[11:58] David Armstrong: Well, and you have a train station, just like at Hello, Dolly! as well.

[12:01] Elizabeth T. Craft: It was a train effect, right? A train coming onto the stage was one of the big events in that show.

[12:06] David Armstrong: Yes, taking advantage of all of the most recent stage technology.

[12:10] Elizabeth T. Craft: You lead us through this sort of remarkable progression that Cohan makes from song and dance man, self-proclaiming himself even, writes a play called The Song and Dance Man that he stars in.

[12:22] David Armstrong: He called himself that very often, and yet not even that far into his career, he becomes also thought of as America's first actor, as one of America's finest actors, especially by the end of his career. That seems like a very unlikely development.

[12:38] Elizabeth T. Craft: Absolutely. We've already seen how he was disparaged by many critics, seen as the lowest of lowbrow. To go from that to America's first actor was a remarkable progression indeed.

[12:49] Elizabeth T. Craft: One of the things I think that caused that is he began writing and performing in more plays, not just musicals, that helped him gain more acceptance by the dramatic critics of his abilities as a playwright and as a performer.

[13:02] David Armstrong: He was found to be a very skilled, naturalistic actor in plays like his own, The Song and Dance Man, from 1923. It was revived in 1930.

[13:12] Elizabeth T. Craft: A little bit ironic, he's playing a song and dance man, but it was a play, and critics really liked his acting in that.

[13:19] David Armstrong: He was sort of acclaimed for never seeming to be acting.

[13:22] Elizabeth T. Craft: Yes, he seemed to just exude whatever he was doing. He dropped the kind of mugging for the audience aspect that we saw in his earlier shows that was more appropriate for early musical comedy. He had, critics described, a reserve, an ability to not overact, to make a small gesture seem very meaningful. To underplay in the sort of way that the greatest actors can do.

[13:47] David Armstrong: Absolutely, yes.

[13:49] Elizabeth T. Craft: And he ends up, by the end of his career, performing in acclaimed plays by other writers, including his contemporary, which is interesting, Eugene O'Neill.

[13:58] David Armstrong: Yes, that was not always his preference to play in works written by others. But in 1933, he did play in Eugene O'Neill's A Wilderness. He received rave reviews. This was a big moment for him as an actor.

[14:11] Elizabeth T. Craft: The New York Times critic, Brooks Atkinson, wrote, "As ironic as it might sound, it has taken O'Neill to show us how fine an actor George M. Cohan is."

[14:20] David Armstrong: That's quite amazing. And then he sort of capitalizes on that a few years later with his performance in I'd Rather Be Right as Franklin Roosevelt in the Rogers and Hart musical.

[14:30] Elizabeth T. Craft: Again, he didn't get along with the Rogers and Hart very well. Didn't he call them Gilbert and Sullivan or something?

[14:36] David Armstrong: That relationship did not go smoothly. Sam Harris was producing, so they were reunited. And he was renowned in the role, but he was not the easiest person to work with when he was not in charge.

[14:48] Elizabeth T. Craft: This was a theme throughout his career, that he wanted to be the one in charge, that he didn't love performing in works by others. But this was a huge highlight in his career, performing FDR in I'd Rather Be Right. He was near 60 and dancing across the stage like a much younger chap.

[15:05] David Armstrong: This is, in fact, to my knowledge, the only video footage of him as a performer. There's a little bit of him in the show that's at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. There's no audio, but you can see him dancing and you get a sense of how talented of a performer he was.

[15:24] Elizabeth T. Craft: And just charismatic and dynamic.

[15:26] David Armstrong: Absolutely. Light on his feet, prancing across the stage. You say that this aspect of him as the entertainer, the fingerprints of that are all over the American musical theater.

[15:38] Elizabeth T. Craft: In his energetic pacing, his blending of genres, his metatheatrical strand, and his cocky masculine protagonist who can't really sing, but can put over a song and caper as much as dance.

[15:52] David Armstrong: Yes, we see that in some of the shows that we've mentioned. Hello, Dolly! has come up. Year in Town and Book of Mormon. I think of figures like Rex Harrison who don't sing, but they can put over a song.

[16:04] Elizabeth T. Craft: We see all of these strands in American musical theater, even though before I started this book, I would have never known to trace them back to Cohan.

[16:11] David Armstrong: It's so interesting to listen to this. There aren't very many recordings of him singing, but it seems sort of like Sophie Tucker did.

[16:19] Elizabeth T. Craft: He stopped singing at some point and just talked everything, which sort of shows this incredible confidence in a way. It's like, I don't have to sing. I can just talk and still be fantastic.

[16:28] Elizabeth T. Craft: Yes. One of the ones I really love is Cohan singing a really early song of his called I Want to Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune.

[16:50] Elizabeth T. Craft: Give us a tune that's worth the listening. Give us a tune that's worth the whistling. I want to soothe the strain instead of a wagon of pain. Give the trombone a chance to blow in it. Give us a dash of rag and go in it.

[17:01] Elizabeth T. Craft: What I'm singing is advocating the popular melody school. I want to hear a Yankee Doodle Tune played by a military band. I want to hear a Yankee Doodle Tune, the only music I can understand.

[17:25] Elizabeth T. Craft: Oh, Sousa, won't you write another march? Yours is just the melody divine. Now, you can have your William Tell, your Faust, and Lowenbrin as well, but I'll take a Yankee Doodle Tune for mine.

[17:39] Elizabeth T. Craft: So you can get a sense of his kind of patter style, the fact that he's not really very frequently landing on the pitch of the note, but around it or moving off it.

[17:49] David Armstrong: Notes he wrote, actually.

[17:51] Elizabeth T. Craft: Notes that he wrote. He didn't feel the need to observe. And we should all take a lesson from that. He can put over the song, but he's not really much of a singer.

[18:00] David Armstrong: But that was part of his distinctive style. We see that in many musical theater protagonists since then.

[18:07] Elizabeth T. Craft: Absolutely.

[18:08] Elizabeth T. Craft: I also love in the song the reference to Wagner. He surely knew who Richard Wagner was, but it's a kind of nose-thumbing gesture to the musical elite.

[18:19] David Armstrong: That's funny.

[18:20] Elizabeth T. Craft: Give me the fellow who writes the mellow contagious strain that's rather yellow. It may be hashy, it may be trashy, but still it's dashy. It gets the cashy. Really clever, it lasts forever. You hear it once, forget it never. For now we are coming to hanky-panky popular melody days.

[18:34] David Armstrong: That is the music, there's no doubt of it, cut all the cheap cadenzas out of it. Music to please the gang, with plenty of biff and bang. Music that all the children hum a bit, all the composers glory some of it in soaring. That's what brings the popular melody craze.

[18:48] David Armstrong: Don't go away. Elizabeth and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[18:54] ♪ Musical number: "I Want to Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[19:22] David Armstrong: Hi, this is David Armstrong, and if you're enjoying this episode, I strongly suspect that you will want to read my new book, Broadway Nation, How Immigrant Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical.

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[20:02] David Armstrong: And Tony Award winning lyricist David Zippel says that David Armstrong's insightful history of the evolution of the Broadway musical and its creators is captivating and comprehensive as well as indispensable. The book is, of course, available on Amazon, but I recommend that you go to the publisher's website, bloomsbury.com, where you will currently receive a 10% discount.

[20:25] David Armstrong: Again, like the podcast that inspired it, the book is titled Broadway Nation, How Immigrant Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. Now back to the show.

[20:38] Elizabeth T. Craft: Your next section is the man who owned Broadway, and to a great extent, he did own Broadway. You write that Cohan exemplified the promise of upward mobility. That's sort of Roosevelt's idea of any man can make a million dollars in America. Any immigrant can make a million dollars in America.

[20:58] Elizabeth T. Craft: And indeed, by the early 1910s, Cohan was a millionaire when that meant something, when a million dollars was a lot of money. It's interesting that he didn't do it alone, and he has this deep relationship, basically, partnership with Sam Harris, who we mentioned a little bit earlier, who is, I think, one of these great Broadway figures who often gets left out of the story, which is understandable because he's behind the scenes to a great extent.

[21:23] David Armstrong: And I think you described him as a playwright's producer at some point. What did you mean by that exactly?

[21:29] Elizabeth T. Craft: That was something that people said in his obituary. A playwright's producer to them was someone who sought to support the ideas of the artists. He put himself second to the artist and their ideas, and he tried to help make those ideas happen.

[21:44] David Armstrong: He also got along very well, reportedly, with everyone. And describe the relationship from what you could glean about it.

[21:50] Elizabeth T. Craft: I agree with you that he is such an important figure and not talked about enough. Cohan wouldn't be Cohan without Harris. Harris was really critical to his success, and it allowed Cohan to be in the business side of things on Broadway, to be a producer, to be a theater owner, but to still—

[22:08] Elizabeth T. Craft: These are two women that are performers in the shows, the Nolan sisters, Alice and Agnes Nolan. I can only assume that meant they spent holidays together, that they're not just having a working relationship, they are constantly with one another, as families would tend to be. They had a very close relationship, as you said, professionally and personally. They had that family tie. But they do have this divorce, basically, over the actor strike, 1919, the strike that basically establishes the Actors' Equity Association. And Cohan is almost alone, and certainly at the end is entirely alone. All the producers eventually capitulate to the demands of Actors' Equity, and he stands out as the one who will not do it.

He and Sam Harris come to an impasse that they cannot bridge. It's a major event smack in the middle of Cohan's career. He's at the height of his career. He is the man who owns Broadway. This becomes his nickname. It's the title of one of his shows. He has made his way in this very difficult industry with the theatrical syndicate, a very powerful monopoly of producers. They've navigated that to get in with the syndicate. They've made their own names. They've become leaders and ambassadors in the industry. The strike happens in 1919. It was unimaginable in a lot of ways that the actors would go on strike. This was a period of a lot of labor unrest, but actors were actors. They were professionals.

But the continued mistreatment, especially of those who were not the big stars, and this sense of a changing industry, and for the big stars that they didn't have as much clout, that things were changing and that they could not get a response from these managers who were not united and were not even collegial. They were unable to successfully respond to Actors' demands or didn't take them seriously. Members of the Actors' Equity Association demanded a closed shop agreement, and when negotiations broke down, they went on strike. This is a period where actors are not paid for rehearsals, have to provide their own costumes very often, have no working rules basically around hours, and that would continue even after the equity strike.

In those movies like 42nd Street, you see them rehearsing all night for the show, which really did happen. You go back and read these accounts of out-of-town tryouts and things. It was not unusual to rehearse till 3 in the morning and then be back in the theater at 8 a.m. Without getting paid for it. And if a show closed, you were out of luck. If you were on the road and the show closed there, you were even more out of luck. Cohan and Harris, by all accounts, were good employers. Cohan had been up through the ranks. They tried to treat their employees well. Cohan really saw the business as an idealized, my handshake means everything, kind of world. But that wasn't the case for all of the producers. And that world was changing. And isn't that part of what he took such umbrage at? Is that they would accuse him of these things when he had not done them?

[25:40] Elizabeth T. Craft: Bingo. Exactly. He was in an uneasy position. He actually writes a hilarious skit about the situation as tensions are mounting that kind of pokes fun at the fact that he's in this uneasy position. He's a manager at this point in his career. That is most of his work, is on the business side. But he's also a star actor and one who would come up through the ranks. So he might have been expected to be the most sympathetic. And it is one of the strange and sad things about his public life that he was so vehemently opposed and becomes the public face and voice of the opposition. But he had a show running on Broadway at the time, The Royal Vagabond. He steps in to save it. The chorus was not on strike.

This was something that he found very hypocritical, that they're out to help the little guy, but the chorus wasn't included. So let's just dig into that because I think that will be confusing to people. Equity at that point was not representing chorus members. They were only representing actors, not the singers and dancers in the show. Not the lowly choristers. They aren't real actors. And I think that was part of the attitude at the time. It was only years later that they brought chorus into the union. And in fact, to this day, the chorus committee of Actors' Equity has tremendous power, I think because they were able to broker that power when they entered the union saying, OK, now you want us to be part of it?

Well, then we're going to have a lot of say about what happens. Yes, they had their own organizing arm when they're brought in. And Cohan found this, at least he said he found it very hypocritical that they're not looking out for the choristers. So that's how the show could keep running, because who was there to perform? Well, the chorus didn't have anything to do. They could step into some of the lead roles and Cohan could step into one of the lead roles. He hands it up. And people commented on what a success it was, that it's the only show running. It's the only show running and it stars George M. Cohan. Exactly. What's not to love? And he even invents new lyrics. In a kingdom of our own, we're going to sit upon a throne with a prince and princess on our knee and they won't be members of the equity.

Reading this now is very funny. At the time, I'm sure the strikers did not find it funny. It really gave them a bad taste in their mouth. But Cohan did not seem to grasp and appreciate the extent of the concerns. He felt he treated the actors fairly. He didn't see why a closed shop agreement would be needed. This was his real beef. We work things out independently. Why do we need a single standard agreement that was going to take away control from him? He even proposes a different organization to be the kind of other option to equity, which makes people even more angry that he's trying to undermine equity in that way. So he wasn't anti-union necessarily. He says he wasn't anti-union, but he was anti-closed shop and the way that equity went about things.

Reading into this, it becomes clear to me that a lot of it was personal. Anecdotes say that he said, if anybody had come and say, it's not you, George. You know, it's these other people, but it's not you. He felt very personally hurt at the way that people treated him when he did these things like step in on the Royal Vagabond. And because of his role as a manager, his friends, his colleagues were all parts of the Broadway community. And he was being pilloried there. So he did go head to toe with equity. He never forgave. He never went back. He never joined equity. So for the rest of his career, he is not an equity member. He was allowed to get away with it. He called himself the only scab on Broadway.

He threatened to retire. He threatened to retire many times in his life. He never really did. He always came back. But his place in the theatrical realm and his legacy never fully recovered from that.

[30:01] Elizabeth T. Craft: So interesting. And of course, now equity has done away with the closed shop as well. A hundred years later, Patti LuPone, I believe, was just appearing on Broadway, not on an equity contract because she didn't want to. It would be very interesting to hear what Cohan would have to say about it all. Very, very interesting. But as you said, he doesn't quite recover. I mean, he recovers professionally from this. He remains a big star. But there's always this little cloud over his relationship with other actors and especially with the union. Yes. And he's not working with Harris anymore. He does continue. He is acting. He is writing. He couldn't give it up if he tried, let's be honest. But he's never quite as successful as he was.

And he's never in the kind of leadership role that he was in the 1910s, which isn't to say that he was. You know, he had many, many accomplishments in the 20s and 30s after this. Amazingly so, because, I mean, the 20s are this huge sea change in American culture. The Jazz Age comes in. Cohan is not a part of that. And yet somehow he's able to remain a major figure, even though he's decidedly old fashioned and out of step with a lot of what's happening. Yes, he kind of marvels at jazz, but doesn't know how to write it. His was the era of ragtime. But he finds a new route to success in these Irish American themed musicals. And that indeed is your next section, the Irish American, where, again, he sort of doesn't entirely abandon the Yankee Doodle boy persona, but now brings his Irish identity much further forward.

Yes. I wondered when I started looking into him, well, what happened? You know, we have these patriotic themed musicals and we have some other things around business and other themes. And we have these Irish American. What changed, in part, the market? And that's where we'll pick up the conversation on the next episode of Broadway Nation, when Elizabeth Craft returns with more about her new book, Yankee Doodle Dandy, George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage.

[31:23] David Armstrong: If you love this podcast and want to delve even deeper into the world of Broadway musicals, I invite you to become a patron of Broadway Nation. For as little as seven dollars a month, you can receive exclusive access to never before heard unedited versions of many of the interviews featured on this podcast. I often record twice as much conversation as ends up in the edited public episodes. And you also have the exclusive opportunity to hear additional in-depth conversations with my frequent co-host, Albert Evans. And all patrons will receive special on-air shout outs and acknowledgments of your vital support. To join, simply go to Broadway Nation podcast dot supercast dot tech. That's all one word.

Broadway Nation podcast dot S.U.P.R.C.A.S.T. dot tech or simply click the link in the show notes to this episode. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Powell's Mocks for his help with editing this episode and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network. So long, Mary, how we hate to see you go.

[32:45] ♪ Musical number: "So Long, Mary" — performed by David Armstrong ♪

[32:50] And tell me, will you all be longing for your Mary? While I roam, so long, Mary, don't forget to come back home.