Curtains.

Mr. Lyons is drama critic for the New York Post and author of Independent Visions, a study of independent American cinema.

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 emotional power. That period extended for roughly three decades, from 1927, the year of the Kern-Hammerstein epic Showboat, until the late 1950s, when West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959) brought the form to the edges of its possibilities, expressing as they did the forces of societal, familial, and psychic disintegration that were soon to tear apart what had been a relatively homogeneous culture. As Hegel wrote (it was in The Pajama Game, I believe), the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk. He meant that wise and witty appreciation of a phenomenon often signifies that the subject is dead as a Rialto turkey. In Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now, critic and commentator Mark Steyn attempts an autopsy of the genre. Peppered with puns, wisecracks, anecdotes, and interviews, the book does not pretend to be a history; it's a series of freeze-frame slides taken from a spy satellite.

The first half of the book, called "Act One," anatomizes the aspects of good (and bad) old musicals synchronically and impressionistically. Topics include music, lyrics, books, openings, Jews, and hit tunes. Steyn is at his best showing how lyrics evolved from the "light verse [in] fixed, formal, measured musical pattern" that characterized Gilbert & Sullivan and early musicals like the 1905 Miss Dolly Dollars into the supple, tricky simplicity of Irving Caesar's "Picture you upon my knee/Tea for two and two for tea," or Lorenz Hart's "We'll have Manhattan/The Bronx and Staten . . ."

Steyn calls lyricist Dorothy Fields "the greatest woman writer of the 20th century" on the basis of seemingly simple lyrics like "Grab your coat and get your hat/Leave your worries on the doorstep." Call it hyperbole, but Steyn brings it off superbly. And he's serious when he calls the "half-century before [rock pioneer] Bill Haley . . . the best that American popular music has ever known, years which saw the rise of jazz, country, blues, good commercial film music, fine pop songs of which a few could reasonably claim to be the only true art songs in the English language . . . and an indigenous musical theatre." Not only is he serious, he's right.

Showboat was not followed by similar epic works. In fact, the '30s were a decade of wit, as epitomized in songs like Cole Porter's "Let's Do It" and musicals like Pal Joey by Rodgers and Hart. The patriotic '40s were a decade of heart, with Rodgers and his new partner, Hammerstein, as its poets. Steyn summarizes the objections to R&H with a crack about how they replaced "him-and-her romance" with "hymns and hearses"-i.e., noble sentiments and tragic plots-but he appreciates their founding works of the 1940s and early 1950s, from Oklahoma to The King and I. In this Golden Age, songs were written for specific characters, for Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun or for Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls or for Mama Rose in Gypsy. Both "compression, the essence of the lyricist's craft," and character-specificity have been lost in the "through-sung" pop-opera scores of the present age, such as those of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

At the end of "Act One," Steyn considers the transitional figure of Stephen Sondheim, lyricist of West Side Story and Gypsy and composer- lyricist of dark, arty '70s works like Company, Follies, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd. In the latter four shows, writes Steyn, the former protege of Oscar Hammerstein set out to repudiate his old master and demonstrate that "marriage is worthless, that all middle- aged lives are failures, that U.S. foreign policy sucks, that we're all potential Charlie Mansons." While Sondheim sought to deconstruct the old musicals' ideology, his music declined from brilliant pastiche to unsingable mess. Steyn is devastating on Sondheim's later work: "The words run away with themselves. You can't follow the meaning, you can't always catch the consonants; all you hear are the rhymes-and the author." Sondheim's career is a paradigm of the centrifugal and self- loathing trajectory of American culture in the '70s.

After "then" comes, alas, "now." "Act Two" of Steyn's book takes us on a roller-coaster ride through the musicals of the '80s and early '90s (the book was originally published in England in 1993 and shows it, as when we read that Paul Simon, who recently composed the megaflop The Capeman, is "lost to the theatre"). This section, also arranged by whimsical theme-for example, "The Brits," "The Fags," "The Rock," "The Flops"-turns into a survey dismaying in content and trivial in form. The name that dominates this late, weak, barbarian-threatened musical era is that of Lloyd Webber, creator of Cats, Phantom of the Opera, and Sunset Boulevard. Between Sondheim, darling of an artily misanthropic elite, and Lloyd Webber, zillionaire purveyor of smooth schmaltz, Steyn tilts toward, and writes with even a sort of reluctant warmth about, Lloyd Webber. The merits and demerits of the various Norma Desmonds in Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard are solemnly discussed.

The lightweight tone of the contemporary stuff derives from Steyn's debonair but disproportionate reliance on casual schmooze. Lines like "as Sir Andrew put it to me . . . " and "Paul Simon remarked that . . . " dot the pages, as do Steyn's putdowns of and comebacks to the mighty over dinner or drinks. It's fine, it's even fun, that Steyn swims in these waters, but this section reads too often like a collection of reheated feature pieces. And unlike such dapper, epigrammatic Broadway veterans as Jule Styne and George Abbott, who drop pearls of wisdom on earlier pages, the new guys are defensive, loquacious, and earnest, like the new musicals they create.

The book's second half might better have been replaced by a systematic and comprehensive treatment of the Golden Age. But system and thoroughness are not Steyn's virtues; if you want them, you can turn to a book like Ethan Mordden's Coming Up Roses: The Broadway Musical in the 1950s, in which a lively and opinionated chronicler takes us show by show-almost number by number-through a very rich decade. Steyn's virtues are sharpness of perception and phrase, audacity and idiosyncrasy of presentation-all grounded in a warm understanding of why great musicals were great in those bygone days when it was always "early in the morning."