Altschuler's book, published in the series The Evolving American Presidency, is a first attempt to fill a gap in presidential historiography by surveying stage Presidents. It performs this through five chapters, on Lincoln, on other heroic Presidents, on antiheroic Presidents, on fictional Presidents, and on Presidents in musical theatre. These then chronologically survey the relevant plays or musicals, providing for each a description of the action, performance history and critical response, and a limited critical analysis from Altschuler. His central thesis is that there has been a shift from heroic to antiheroic Presidents on stage pivoting around Barbara Garson's MacBird! (1967).

As an introductory informational survey of this body of theatrical works, this is a useful book. As the works themselves liven up (mainly with the arrival of antiheroic Presidents) so does the book. The tone of many of the works is nicely captured; I particularly enjoyed the vision of the first-act closer to Camping with Henry and Tom (1993), one of quite a number of works dealing with Harding, which apparently features Henry Ford and Harding preparing to despatch an injured deer with a tire iron while Thomas Edison listens, for reasons unexplained, to a recording of I Pagliacci (72).

Yet there are limitations. Altschuler includes works originating in and performance histories from both Britain and the United States. But his choices are selective – he appears unaware of recent British productions of Gershwin's Of Thee I Sing and Let 'Em Eat Cake, and his discussion of Sondheim's Assassins would have benefitted from analysis of Sondheim's broader critical fate in both countries. More problematic is his treatment of two British plays from the Bush II era (David Hare's Stuff Happens (2003) and Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon (2006)). These are the major British authored works discussed; whether they are or are not unique needed fuller consideration; that both transferred to Broadway does not get around the point. Further, it seems clear that the 2000s have seen an uptick in staged Presidents but because these fall across several of Altschuler's categories he is unable to fully explore its causes.

Also problematic is Altschuler's omission of 1776 (1969). Granted the musical does not directly feature Presidents or the presidency but it includes several prominent future Presidents (and Altschuler does include an earlier play on pre-presidential Madison) and its representation of American politics onstage ought to be considered in comparison to the works Altschuler does mention, particularly given that it deals significantly with the racial issue, which is shown as significant in the failure of 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue (1976).

This book will be an important source of information for scholars of the presidency in American culture, but it leaves room for deeper analysis of the relationship of these multifarious staged Presidents with the cultural time in which they were produced –an investigation which might most usefully start by considering the nature of the boom in such representations since 2000.