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Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now, by Mark Steyn (Routledge, 352 pp., $27)

THE Broadway musical in its prime is now routinely accepted as one of the great American cultural achievements. Like Elizabethan drama and Hollywood film of the 1930s and ’40s, it marked a happy confluence of popular taste and sophisticated craftsmanship. The Golden Age of the musical and of popular song was a time when new ethnic groups—indeed a whole nation— were bursting with vitality, when musical traditions like operetta and revue were ripe for new shapes, and when a language (demotic American) was being used with freshness, sass, and

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Donald Lyons

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Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now, by Mark Steyn (Routledge, 352 pp., $27)

THE Broadway musical in its prime is now routinely accepted as one of the great American cultural achievements. Like Elizabethan drama and Hollywood film of the 1930s and ’40s, it marked a happy confluence of popular taste and sophisticated craftsmanship. The Golden Age of the musical and of popular song was a time when new ethnic groups—indeed a whole nation— were bursting with vitality, when musical traditions like operetta and revue were ripe for new shapes, and when a language (demotic American) was being used with freshness, sass, and