George Abbott was not, in any sense, a political dramatist, but, in
the mid-Fifties, he was asked to stage a rally for Adlai
Stevenson—an odd choice considering it was Abbott’s 1950 hit Call
Me Madam which gave Eisenhower his campaign song, “They Like Ike.”
Anyway, he said yes and went down to Madison Square Garden only to
find that the Democrats invariably turned up late for rehearsal,
which he hated, and, worse, hadn’t learned their lines. He withdrew
from the rally.

It’s tempting to see this as some sort of political metaphor. At any
rate, it exemplifies Abbott’s approach to his art: he was a
practical man of the theater, open-minded about content because he
understood that what counts is how efficiently you serve it. I dimly
recall saying as much in these pages a few months ago; in fact, since
September, I seem to have cited Abbott almost every month, which is
strange when you consider the man was 107. But on Broadway these
days the only people who aren’t dead are incredibly old, and it
seemed eerily fitting that the oldest of the lot endured even as
everything around him crumbled, including the theater Broadway
named in his honor, the George Abbott—now a parking lot. In 1993,
while the Great White Way was celebrating its centenary, Abbott was
upstate, rewriting Damn Yankees. “What’s the new script like?” I
enquired. “Hard to say,” he replied, “but it’s better than what most
106-year-old writers are doing.”