Much ink has been spilled to propound the idea that from around 1890 to the interwar period, English advocates of realism struggled against a conservative hegemony of stage pictorialism, star actor-managers, and demonstrative acting, eventually winning out through the auspices of dramatists like Shaw, Galsworthy, and Granville-Barker. This stakes the Stage Society, Royal Court Theatre, and a handful of prescient radicals like Lena Ashwell and Annie Horniman against profit-motivated managers such as George Edwardes and Frank Curzon; a philistine British public who preferred entertainment over intellectual engagement; and the delights of Gaiety burlesque, variety at the Empire music hall, and society comedies at Wyndham's. Len Platt's Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890– 1939 upsets the applecart by arguing that musical comedy, a genre that appealed to bourgeois tastes by never challenging them, was centrally engaged with the modernism. Drawing on a database of about 160 musical comedies composed in Britain and presented in the West End from 1892 (In Town) to 1938 (Running Riot), Platt demonstrates how the musical comedies' “story lines participated in that great enterprise of making the modern manifest” (23). The plots, characters, and dialogue are formulaic enough to sustain generalizations, and—setting aside thorny issues about formalist distinctions between burlesque, operetta, and musical comedy, and ignoring the music per se—the exuberant high style of works such as An Artist's Model (1895) and Our Miss Gibbs (1909) all “made a self-conscious push for the middle ground of safe pleasure” for audiences that enjoyed joie de vivre celebrated in tandem with innovation, and newness as a naturalized aspect of modernity (23). At the center of these plots is always “the girl,” a gorgeous, self-regarding beauty who confronts outmoded tradition and marries her joie de modernité to the sophistication and solidity of an otherwise doomed aristocracy. Confidently asserting democratization through limited class inclusiveness, the nation's aristocratic past is propelled into a future, infused with new blood that is glamorous, feminine, and irresistibly unconventional. Thus, musical comedy engaged in debates, and definitely took sides, yet scrupulously avoided being critical.

In his analysis of musical comedy's rise and fall, Platt conscientiously sets aesthetic characteristics in line with cultural rationales for audience taste. In the chapter “Doing Other Cultures,” for example, the ever-desirable Continental settings are revealed as rural, feudal, and if not literally medieval then perpetually backward. This, according to Platt, was a comforting fiction as Britain's economic and military position slipped. Americans appear as admiring prodigals prepared to put their wealth in the service of Britain. Though more noticeably “pseudo-educational spectacles” (65), the Orientalist settings that characterize several blockbuster musical comedies—The Geisha (1896), San Toy (1899), The Cingalee (1904), and the record-setting Chu Chin Chow (1916), which played to over 2 million people in its initial four-year run—also affirmed British superiority in a familiar colonialist pattern of self-aware, self-mocking, but never self-deprecating Britons amid natives who are made to look ridiculous in their attempts to imitate their betters and modernize. Interracialism is contained: when British men pair with Oriental women, the audience knows that the Eastern characters are played by glamorous British actresses. In the chapter dedicated to gender and sexuality, Platt emphasizes the importance of fashionably attired women to musical comedy: in the absence of flesh-colored tights (standbys of pantomime, ballet, and burlesque), beauties in haute couture are the bait. This still panders to sexual fantasies while inscribing gender roles, and even the most outspoken feminist characters are narratively reclaimed by admitting that deep down they adore fashion and frivolity.

This provides the contours of a specifically British idiom for musical comedy, separate from popular Continental operettas composed by Franz Lehár and Oscar Strauss and American imports by Jerome Kern (even when paired with P. G. Wodehouse). It also provides a background to ask why British products all but disappeared by the 1930s. When the decline began is a matter of dispute. If it began during World War I, with a shift away from operetta (analogous with Vienna and Central Europe in general) and toward revue, this does not account for the extraordinary popularity of Chu Chin Chow. If it began later, it does not explain why American musical comedy—which did not evince its characteristic fully integrated plots until Anything Goes (1934)—eclipsed British products in the 1920s. British wartime musical comedies, Platt suggests, turned away from their signature intertextuality with music hall and began to rely more on comic situations. More important, however, was the sense that time had left the British musical comedy's preoccupation with modernity behind: it still invoked modernity as requisite background, but no longer as mediator of the plot. If young audiences directed their allegiance to cinema, they found in it a more appealing medium for engaging technology as well as mediating cultural anxieties. Musical comedy succumbed to its own narrative inflexibility: modernity was no longer such a jolly idea, and British producers better captured the spirit of innovation and volatile mockery through revue. This is a compelling hypothesis that accounts for a great deal more than Platt ostensibly takes on. The potentially circular argument matching aesthetics to content eschews a simple rise-and-fall arc dependent on shifts in the cultural Zeitgeist and instead allows for an aging audience to witness the esprit of their youth succumb not only to battlefield fatalities but to the demise of a national prerogative for arrogant domination.

Instead of a modernist victory over this genre and a populist defeat in the entrenchment of realism, Platt sees musical comedies' technologically sophisticated self-consciousness about the modern condition rebuffed, and a shift of popular box office appeal in favor of British products (such as Noël Coward's) that synthesize lighthearted class consciousness with the revue format. Whereas Americans sought tighter narrative and thematic connections among book, lyrics, and music, British revue relied explicitly on pastiche. British “musical comedy” lost out to American “musicals” like Show Boat (1927), Oklahoma (1943), and South Pacific (1949), no less celebratory of nostalgia, charming backwaters, or foreign exotics but with a new sensibility about social engagement, making the British Empire and its aspirations irrelevant and invisible.