The Bootleg Files: George M!

BOOTLEG FILES 905: “George M!” (1970 television adaptation of the Broadway musical starring Joel Grey and Bernadette Peters).

LAST SEEN: On YouTube.

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the cracks.

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.

On April 10, 1968, the musical “George M!” opened on Broadway. The show offered a biography of the great entertainer George M. Cohan and featured a healthy serving of his classic songs. Joel Grey, coming off his Tony Award-winning performance in “Cabaret,” starred as Cohan and an up-and-coming Bernadette Peters played his sister Josie.

“George M!” ran for 433 performances before closing on April 26, 1969. At the time, the Hollywood studios were still producing big movie musicals based on Broadway shows and would it have been logical for “George M!” to make its way to the silver screen. However, there was another film on the same subject that had already achieved classic status – the 1942 “Yankee Doodle Dandy” starring James Cagney in his Oscar-winning performance as Cohan – so the prospect of a big screen “George M!” was nil.

However, an opportunity arose to bring “George M!” to the small screen via the Bell System Family Theater, which produced one-shot specials for broadcast on NBC. But rather than offer a filmed record of the Broadway production – complete with its large cast of singers and dancers plus elaborate costumes and sets – this adaptation decided to play it cheap by reinventing the show as a rehearsal for “George M!” rather than the actual production. Thus, the need for special sets was replaced with a bare-bones rehearsal room, and the big production numbers were staged with as few people as possible. A good chunk of the two-act show’s score was also cut to fit a tight 90-minute running time.

To compensate for the reduction in flash and pizazz, the production brought in some notable (if less than boffo) talent to fill the supporting roles – Jack Cassidy and Nanette Fabray as the Cohan parents, Jesse White as showman E.F. Albee, Red Buttons as Cohan’s creative partner Sam H. Harris, and rising stars Anita Gillette and Blythe Danner as Cohan’s first and second wives. Only Grey and Peters repeated their Broadway roles.

To its credit, “George M!” offered a more accurate biography of Cohan than “Yankee Doodle Daddy,” which omitted the messier aspects of the star’s life – including the failure of his first marriage and his anti-union sentiments during the Actors Equity strike of 1919.

But if “Yankee Doodle Dandy” created a sanitized Cohan who was something of a too-good-to-be-true character, it also showcased Cagney in one of the great performances of film history. Indeed, it is difficult to watch Joel Grey’s work without comparing it to Cagney’s Cohan – there is no comparison, as the workmanlike Grey of this 1970 TV production never comes close to equaling Cagney’s dynamic personality and the brilliant eccentricity of his singing and dancing in the 1942 film.

However, this might be the problem of this adaptation of “George M!” and not the fault of Grey, who performed several numbers from the show on Ed Sullivan’s variety program – on Sullivan’s stage, he brought energy and charisma that is not seen in the television version of the musical. But on the other hand, Grey was never a satisfactory on-camera presence until the 1972 film version of “Cabaret” – indeed, that film’s director Bob Fosse went into pre-production preferring to have Anthony Newley or (incredibly) Ruth Gordon instead of Grey, who was cast at the insistence of producer Marty Baum.

Oddly, whereas Grey doesn’t give it his all, the other cast members in “George M!” give the impression of playing to the last row of the theater – everyone else is working overtime to sell their performances, particularly Cassidy and Fabray who invest their roles as the old-time vaudevillian parents of Cohan with the glorious show biz corn cultivated by the stars of that yesteryear circuit.

“George M!” was broadcast on NBC on September 12, 1970, to decent reviews and nominations for Walter C. Miller and Martin Charnin’s direction and for Alan Johnson’s choreography. To date, there has been no commercial home entertainment release of the production – and, for that matter, “George M!” doesn’t get revived much in theatrical settings anymore.

For those curious about this show, here is an unauthorized YouTube posting of “George M!” along with the aforementioned presentation of the show on Ed Sullivan’s program. Too bad Bell System Family Theater didn’t spend the extra money to do the full show that Sullivan excerpted.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.

Listen to Phil Hall’s award-winning podcast “The Online Movie Show with Phil Hall” on SoundCloud and his radio show “Nutmeg Chatter” on WAPJ-FM in Torrington, Connecticut, with a new episode every Sunday. His new book “100 Years of Wall Street Crooks” is now in release through Bicep Books.