The Broadway Anthology | Page 6

a camel?Or a bloodhound chasing Eliza, I'll kick or I'll bite?The type-choosing manager.
GEORGE M. COHAN
Blessed be Providence?That gave us our Cohan;?Irreverent,?Resourceful, prolific, steady-advancing?George M.?Nothing in life?Better becomes him?Than his earliest choice?Of Jerry and Helen?For father and mother;?Bred in the wings and the dressing room,?The theatre alley his playground,?Hotels his home and his schoolhouse,?Blessed with a wonderful sister,?And in love with a violin.?From baby days used to the footlights,?With infrequent teachers of book lore?In the cities of lengthy engagements?Showing him pages of learning?That he turned from to life's open volume,?Acquiring indelible lessons,?Loyalty, candor, clear seeing,?Sincerity, plain speaking, love of his own,?Passion for all things American.?From Jerry, his father,?Came Celtic humor, delight in the dance,?And devotion to things of the theatre;?From Helen, his mother,?Depth, Celtic devotion to things of the spirit,?Fineness of soul.?Early he turned from his fiddle?To write popular songs?And tunes so whistly and catchy?That the music of a child?Enraptured the nation.?Then followed comedy sketches,?Gay little pieces that made public?And player-folk chatter of Cohan.?Later, essaying the musical comedy,?He wrote "Running for Office,"?To be followed by that impudent?Classic of fresh young America,?"Little Johnnie Jones."?One followed another in rapid succession;?His name grew a cherished possession,?And ever his dancing delighted.?His manner of singing and speaking?Provoked to endless imitation.?His personality became better known?Then the President's.?Always he soared in ambition?And, becoming a lord of the theatre,?He ventured on serious drama,?And out of his wisdom and watching?Wrote masterful plays,?Envisaging the types of our natives.?Truly a genius,?Genius in friendship, genius in stagecraft,?Genius in life!?Even in choosing a partner?He fattened his average,?Batting four hundred?By taking a kindred irreverent soul,?Graduated out of the whirlpool?That wrecks all but the strongest,?Born on the eastern edge?Of Manhattan,?Sam H. Harris, man of business,?Who to the skill of the trader?Adds the joy in life?And the sense of humor,?Coupled with pleasure in giving?And helping?That Cohan demands of his pals.?Together they plan wonderful projects,?And the artist soul?And the soul of commerce?Are an unbeatable union.?Best of all about Cohan?Is his congenital manliness.?He sees Americans?As our soil and our air and our water?Have made them;?Types as distinct as the Indian.?He follows no school,?Knows little of movements artistic.?A lonely creator,?His friends are not writing men,?Reformers, uplifters or zealots.?He writes the life he has lived?So fully and zestfully,?And over it all plays like sheet lightning?A beneficent humor.?Growth is his hall-mark,?Hard work his chief recreation;?Not Balzac could toil with labor titanic?More terribly.?George M. Cohan,?Excelling in everything--?Beloved son, brother, father, partner, friend,?Our best-beloved man of the theatre.
DAVID BELASCO
King David of old slew the Philistines;?Our David has made them admirers and patrons;?He has numbered the people?Night after night in his theatres.?Will he ever, I wonder, send forth for the Shunammite??Many there be who would answer his calling,?For he has shown ambitious fair women?To acting's high places.?As Rodin in marble saw wondrous creations?To be freed by the chisel,?So Belasco in immature genius and beauty?Sees the resplendent star to be kindled?At his own steady beacon.?Too varied a mind for our comprehension,?Too big and too broad and too subtle?To be understood of the bourgeois American?Whom he has led decade after decade?By a nose ring artistic.?Capable of everything, he has worked?With the ease of a master, giving the public?Marvelous detail, unfailing sensation and poses pictorial;?Preferring the certain success to arduous striving?For the more excellent things of the future.?Like David his forebear, a king but no prophet,?Amazingly wise in his own generation.?A wizard in art of the everyday,?Lord of the spotlight and dimmer,?But nursing the unconquerable hope, the inviolable shade?Of what in his dreams Oriental?He fain would do, did not necessity drive him.?His the fascination of a great personality.?Who knoweth not him of the clerical collar??Hair of the sage and eyes of the poet,?Features perfectly drawn and as mobile?As those of the inspired actor;?With speech so much blander than honey?And insight that maketh his staged stumbling in bargains?Cover the shrewdness of a masterly trader.?None better than he knoweth the crowd and its likings,?As to using the patter of drama artistic,?That's where he lives.?With incense and color and scenery?He refilleth the bottle of art so that the contents?Go twice better than in the original package.?Thanks be to David for joy in the playhouse.?Wizard, magician, necromancer of switchboards,?He hath woven spells from the actual,?Keeping ideals and ideas well in the background.?Like Gautier, these things delight him:?Gold, marble and purple; brilliance, solidity, color.?He can stage Tiffany's jewels but not Maeterlinck's bees.?Deep in his soul there are tempests?Revealed in the storms of his dramas--?Sandstorm and snowstorm, rainstorm and hurricane.?That nature revealed in its subtle reactions?Would show in its deeps the soul of an Angelo?Subdued to success and dyed by democracy.?Opportunism hath made him?An artistic materialist.?One work remains for David Belasco,?And that is to stage with patient precision?A cross section in drama of his own self-surprising,?Making the world sit up and take notice?With what "masterly detail," "unfailing atmosphere,"?"Startling reality" he can star David Belasco.
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