George M. Cohan Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stanley Green

Critical Essay by Stanley Green

SOURCE: "George M. Cohan," in The World of Musical Comedy, Grosset & Dunlap, 1960, pp. 24-35.

In the following excerpt, Green recounts the highlights of Cohan's career.

Victor Herbert and George M. Cohan were the two most important creative figures of the American musical stage during the first decade of the twentieth century. Apart from this, and the coincidence that both were of Irish descent, each man epitomized an entirely disparate form of musical theatre. Herbert, the thoroughly trained musician, sought to perpetuate the traditions of the Viennese operetta; Cohan, the untrained song-and-dance man, tried to break away from anything that suggested the Old World. For Herbert, the Broadway stage was something of a step downward from the elevated world of opera and the concert hall; for Cohan, it was a definite step upward from the world of vaudeville of which he had been a part since birth. Herbert felt...
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