The Theatre: Jerry Cohan's Boy

George M. Cohan, who has been a professional actor since he wore knee pants, went to see an amateur show last week. Far from being bored, he laughed, cried, made a speech. The show, called Yankee Doodle Boy and written and produced by the Harlequins of Washington's Catholic University, told the story of Cohan's life.

It opened backstage in a gaslit provincial vaudeville theatre, with performers peeping at a newborn babe lying in a trunk. "Whose brat is that?" a woman asks, is answered "That's Jerry and Helen Cohan's boy." Suddenly, out of the trunk rises a tiny hand waving a tiny flag.

Yankee Doodle Boy hits pretty hard at Cohan's early days when, as a flip, conceited kid playing in vaudeville, he high-hatted stagehands, raised hell over his billing. But as Cohan matures, the story mellows, draws an affectionate picture of the Great Flag-Waver in his prime. Playing the old songs, bringing on the scene David Belasco, Fay Templeton, George Arliss, Yankee Doodle Boy marches up to 1939. Of young James Graham's take-off of Cohan's take-off of F. D. R. in I'd Rather Be Right, Cohan remarked: "The kid did it better than I did."

Said Cohan afterwards: "So far as I'm concerned, this is the greatest night in the American theatre." For the Harlequins it was a great night also: Cohan, who last year turned down large offers from Hollywood for his life story had made the Harlequins a present of it.