In 1932 an aesthete from Iowa named Carl Van Vechten visited Vienna and reported back home that “they don't play Johann [Strauss] here anymore; it's all [George] Gershwin and [Irving] Berlin.” The exaggeration was defensible, given the extraordinary impact overseas that American popular music had been exerting for at least two decades. Emanating mostly from Jews based in New York, such songs were seeping into the nation's imaginative life as though through osmosis. In 1938, when Richard Wright published his first full-scale work of fiction, the epigraph to Uncle Tom's Children quotes from “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?”. Wright identifies it only as a “popular song,” as though no one had actually written it or deserved credit for it. In fact, the song was then only two years old; Irving Caesar and Sammy Lerner were responsible for the lyrics, and Gerald Marks for the music. The unpretentious charm, the sublime buoyancy that such songwriters contrived to convey was inescapable. Berlin's “A Russian Lullaby” was the first song Leonard Bernstein recalled hearing as a child. He would grow up to compose the score for the best-selling LP ever included in the catalog of Deutsche Grammaphon (West Side Story). That the final phase of Bernstein's career as a conductor was more closely associated with the Vienna Philharmonic than with any other orchestra loops back to (and magnifies) what Van Vechten had noticed during the interwar period.

No one's career had a trajectory more astonishing than Berlin's, however. Like Stephen Foster and Stephen Sondheim, Berlin was both a composer and a lyricist, though he could neither read nor write music, and though his formal education was close to null. Yet no one in American history wrote more indelible songs, which constitutes a mystery that no scholarly research or flashes of insight can satisfactorily resolve. Biographers have noted that Berlin's father, Moses Baline, had been a cantor, though he died when his son was only thirteen; and the influence of liturgical music is extremely elusive. To be sure Berlin worked incessantly, and the formidable talent against which he was competing for popular acclaim must have intensified his drive for the success in the marketplace that was his only standard of excellence. “The mob is always right” was Berlin's credo, and for half a century no one was more inventive in satisfying mass taste. But how he managed to do so remains too puzzling to be penetrated.

Jeffrey Magee's volume nevertheless illuminates the theatrical songs with impressive exactitude, and offers a meticulous and very admiring account of what made Berlin's music tick. Writing an extensive sequel to the late Charles Hamm's scholarship on the early songs, Magee insists that Berlin was fundamentally a creature of the theater, rather than a throwback to the gags-and-gals era of vaudeville, before the integrated musical became the standard to which Broadway babies and their muses aspired. Instead of reducing Berlin to a writer of Tin Pan Alley hits, incapable of writing, say, an opera like Porgy and Bess (and envious of Gershwin's flair for doing so), Magee argues that theatrical songs, expressive of the emotions of imaginary characters, best reveal the genius of this immigrant whose achievements were the stuff of legend before he found time to become a naturalized citizen. The songs that Berlin wrote for revues before the Great War and eventually for the canonical Annie Get Your Gun (1946) after the Second World War managed the feat of achieving both topicality and timelessness. Though aiming at immediate popularity, his craft was sophisticated enough to earn the respect of posterity. Berlin's virtuosity was so overflowing that no distinctive signature can be identified. This versatility Magee scrutinizes with such detail that his ideal readers are musicologists, who can appreciate the author's praise for “I Got the Sun in the Morning,” for example: “The refrain begins on a dominant chord with a flattened fifth in the bass, creating an oscillating chromatic effect as the chord alternates with the tonic” (240).

Though Magee offers no fresh insights into Berlin's personality, this book does moderate the conventional understanding of the songwriter's uncritical, reflexive patriotism. Take race, for example. Berlin was, Magee emphasizes, habitually committed to the tradition of minstrelsy that after the Second World War became utterly discredited. But Berlin also softened the edges of that nineteenth-century racist inheritance, and for Ethel Waters in As Thousands Cheer (1933) wrote a poignant indictment of lynching called “Supper Time.” White members of the cast protested that the song was unsuitable for the show; so did the reviewer for The New Yorker. Berlin ignored their objections. Though he gave Waters four songs in As Thousands Cheer, she got lesser billing because she was black; but she also claimed that no one ever gave her better material than Irving Berlin. A decade later the war against the Axis was fought by an American military that was entirely segregated. There were minor breaches at the very end of the war—and there was also This Is the Army, a revue that Berlin conceived and produced to boost the morale of servicemen. The touring company included a “platoon of black talent [that] made it the only racially integrated military unit before the army was officially desegregated in 1948” (207). Late in 1942, when Berlin learned that a black woman in Washington, D. C. had been denied admission to see a performance aimed at the capital's civilians, he offered to buy tickets for any Negro patrons wanting to see This Is the Army from “any seat in the house” (214).

Someone who claimed that his earliest memory of Tsarist Russia was of a pogrom seemed destined to write an unofficial national anthem like “God Bless America.” Berlin shared with his songwriting contemporaries a faith in the basic goodness of the citizenry; he was certainly one of the sunshine boys. But in the 1920s he could not ignore the threats that nativism and bigotry posed to the inclusion of minorities like his own, and to their hopes for adaptation and acceptance. But his empathy for their plight took the form of making Jewish homelessness comic. In 1924, the year that Congress overwhelmingly passed a law imposing quotas on immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, the former Israel Baline gave Fanny Brice (formerly Fania Borach) a Music Box number entitled “Don't Send Me Back to Petrograd.” She is desperate to become an American, and to abide by its expectations of industriousness. “I'll promise to work the best I can,” she sings. “I'll even wash sheets for the Ku Klux Klan” (quoted on 142). No wonder then that the photograph on the cover of Stuart J. Hecht's book about the investment of the Broadway musical in the American Dream is of Irving Berlin. Of the eight chapters in Transposing Broadway, only one is devoted to a single songwriter; no extra credit for guessing which.

Hecht is an elegant writer who is especially good at analyzing the function of particular songs in advancing the narrative or in exposing the character who belts them out. He is also adept at formulating apt juxtapositions of musicals that are rarely if ever considered together. For example, Hecht contrasts two shows that depict employees in the clothing industry who threaten to strike. Harold Rome's Pins and Needles (1936) emerged from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and ran for over 1,100 performances on Broadway. Pins and Needles satirizes the capitalist system, from the perspective of the proletariat. The Pajama Game (1954) Hecht cites as a sign of the prosperity that became widespread after the Second World War; class conflict was dismissed as unnecessary, an impediment to economic growth. The political stance of The Pajama Game is therefore conservative. Or take two musicals that opened in 1998, both under the auspices of the Canadian producer Garth Drabinsky. Both Ragtime and Parade are set in the era of the Great War, and address what the Jewish defense agencies once called “intergroup relations.” But Ragtime follows, in part, the upward mobility of Tateh from the Lower East Side to film-making fame as “the Baron Ashkenazy,” while the fate of a black pianist is persecution and violent death. Parade has a subject that might be deemed unsuitable for a musical—the notorious frame-up and lynching of the manager of an Atlanta factory in 1913–1915. The martyrdom of Leo Frank demonstrates the limits of assimilation, even for a middle-class Jew.

Far more than Magee, Hecht seeks to extract historical meaning from the musicals under consideration, to specify their cultural context or their political salience. He is willing to take greater risks in generalizing about the place of such works in the national experience. But because the textual design of Transposing Broadway lacks Magee's laser-beam scrupulousness, Hecht's book feels thinner. Magee hugs the shore of his announced topic and rarely strays from it. His is therefore an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the songwriter whom Jerome Kern famously declared—as early as 1924—to be synonymous with American music itself. Because Transposing Broadway covers diverse works over the span of nearly a century, the author inevitably opens himself to the suspicion of capriciousness, by selecting the musicals that display a special interest in assimilation.

The conceptual problem is most evident in the chapter on Fiddler on the Roof (1964). No musical was ever more Jewish; the subject, the creators, the characters remind no one of, say, Naughty Marietta. But Tevye and his family and his neighbors do not exactly have assimilation uppermost in their minds, and therefore Hecht has to base his book on a broader claim. The Broadway musical, he writes, “provided a setting for the ongoing discussion of how outsiders might gain access to America and its ‘Dream’ of acceptance and success” (1). The mostly Jewish creators of the book musical devised “a sort of tacit blueprint on how to make it in America,” which usually entailed outsiders “having to transform themselves in order to do so” (4).

Because Jews established such a template, it matters little to Hecht whether the auteurs are Jews, or whether the outsiders searching for that green light at the end of the dock are merely surrogates for Jews. What matters, he argues, is how inclusiveness is eventually shown to be compatible with a respect for difference, how pedigree has yielded to the prospect of upward mobility grounded in personal merit. One consequence of this thesis is that the reader learns a lot about musicals but very little about Jews. In 1958 the Tony for the Best Musical was awarded to Meredith Willson's The Music Man, which entitles Hecht to examine a work that was not conceived by a Jew and is set among the echt-Gentile townspeople of River City, Iowa. All the key creative figures in the making of West Side Story, which lost the Tony to The Music Man that year, were Jews; and yet Hecht devotes the same attention to a musical that was initially conceived in terms of conflict between Jews and Catholics. The argument that is integral to Transposing Broadway nevertheless cannot convincingly embrace Fiddler on the Roof, which is about the pressures placed on tradition, rather than about individual success in the New World. Perhaps sensing the difficulty, Hecht emphasizes Fiddler's historical importance, which he claims is the presentation on stage of an ethnically homogeneous community so meriting appreciation on its own terms that no American stand-in for the audience is needed. This claim is odd, because operettas were often set in some romantic foreign duchy, and because some book musicals prior to Fiddler also lack American characters (Candide, My Fair Lady, Camelot).

The stage is historically the site of conflict, upon which dramatic momentum depends. Yet nowhere does Hecht consider whether the dilemma of outsiders facing insiders is indigenous to dramatic plotting, rather than a particular case of Jewish sensitivity to the unfair barriers of exclusion. Perhaps the challenge of ethnic incorporation in America is merely an instance of the structural imperatives of dramaturgy itself. Even if Jews have notably shaped musicals that have condemned bigotry (Show Boat, South Pacific, West Side Story, Ragtime), Hecht shows surprisingly little curiosity about the actual Jewish feelings and allegiances of those creators (except for Irving Berlin and Jerome Robbins). Hecht thus seems to take for granted the power of Jewish identity, exceeding any other influence, to establish the meaning of such musicals. But what makes the formation of such works the near-monopoly of one ethno-religious group needs to be made explicit (and counter-examples confronted). Transposing Broadway is therefore under-theorized. Yet no reader is likely to miss, and indeed no fan of the American musical is likely to ignore, how often its subject is show business itself. The line that begins with Show Boat then runs through Pal Joey, Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me Kate, Gypsy, Funny Girl, Follies, A Chorus Line, Chicago, Dreamgirls, and finally down to The Producers, as though popular entertainment might exemplify the democratic vision of talent being rewarded, and of success coming within reach of anyone. In a republic that never had to bear the weight of a peerage, Broadway could promise opportunity to those whose families had come in steerage.