Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway, George M. Cohan’s sixth Broadway musical, opened Jan. 1, 1906, at the New Amsterdam Theatre and ran for 90 performances, closing March 17. It reopened November 5 at the New York Theatre with the cast almost unchanged and played an additional 32 performances, closing December 1. Its only Broadway revival was in 1912 at the Cohan Theatre, where it ran for 36 performances with Cohan in the leading role. The creative team for the original production, presented by Theatrical Syndicate founders A.L. Erlanger and Marc Klaw, included Cohan (book, music, lyrics, direction), Frederic Solomon (music direction), F. Richard Anderson (costumes), and John H. Young, Ernest Albert and Frank Marsden (sets).
The cast included Fay Templeton (Mary Jane Jenkins), Victor Moore (Kid Burns), Donald Brian (Tom Bennet), and Lois Ewell (Flora Dora Dean). The show contains only five songs, but they are some of Cohan’s best-known tunes, including “So Long Mary,” introduced by Templeton, and the title song, introduced by Moore, who was appearing in his first Broadway musical. Below is the chorus of the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy, featuring Irene Manning as Fay Templeton in recreations of “Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (reprise) / So Long Mary,” supervised by George M. Cohan himself.