Those who know Ray Bolger's name probably remember him as the Scarecrow in MGM's 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz. Yet the vaudevillian-turned-Broadway-actor-turned-movie-and-TV-star's career has been all but eclipsed by his most famous role. To recover this legacy, Holly Van Leuven offers up Ray Bolger: More than a Scarecrow, the first published biography of the late American entertainer. More than a Scarecrow is a loving account of Bolger's origins, development, and eventual decline as a performer. It tracks the trail the late American entertainer wove among the suburbs of 1920s Boston, the footlights of 1930s Broadway, the sound stages of 1940s Hollywood, a grueling USO tour of the South Pacific during the Second World War, and even the hallowed halls of Washington, DC, as a proponent of Nixon's first presidential campaign. Van Leuven's book takes up two tasks: as it chronicles the life and work of a long-admired performer, it also attempts to highlight his significance by emphasizing how Bolger's story “touches on the histories of most of the important popular media in America for most of the twentieth century” (6). Bolger won popularity across a number of performance forms, and Van Leuven attempts to show us how he leveraged—and even helped shape—the unique quality of these forms as they emerged.

The book's biggest boon also seems to be Van Leuven's greatest joy. Unprecedented access to Bolger's personal papers yields many of the letters, clippings, personal writings, and scrapbooks which form the bulk of the book's primary material. Supplemented by archival sources culled from other libraries, secondary accounts of American musical theater history, and interviews with Bolger's surviving friends and colleagues, the actor's personal effects continually rise to the surface of the text. Van Leuven's narration tries to capture these clusters of detail in their striking particularity. Reading about the strange appeal of Bolger's “chinless profile” or getting a glimpse into life at Broadway's Palace Theater, where vaudeville veterans “strutted back and forth” on the sidewalk “with their lapels and noses turned up,” one might get an intimate feel for the texture of Bolger's work and life environments (1, 35). They were, in Van Leuven's rendering, constantly filled with outsized personalities and exciting happenings. This attention to detail arguably simulates and recovers a sense of the impact Bolger had on the audiences he reached in his lifetime.

Van Leuven's book overflows with such information (which forms the bulk of the text) but rarely synthesizes it into larger arguments for Bolger's historical or artistic relevance. While prioritizing illustrative detail may be appropriate for a biography written for general readership, it undermines More than a Scarecrow’s aims as a scholarly work. This fact cannot be overstated; for many reasons, it puts the book in questionable relation to scholarly literatures concerning American dance and theater history. When Van Leuven generates dramatic effect while describing competing interests between various commercial-entertainment formations, she often does so at the expense of effective historical and theoretical contextualization. Take, for example, the book's fourth chapter, which glosses the concurrent and often tense development of musical revue and musical comedy during the Great Depression. Pitting the latter's commitment to “confront[ing] the truth” of American social life against the former's promotion of escapist “fantasy,” Van Leuven suggests one way to understand the challenges Bolger faced as a vaudevillian caught in a changing performance context (65). A binaristic view of that context, however, oversimplifies the story; indeed, it does not accord with existing scholarly histories of American musical theater, which generally agree that these seemingly disparate forms shared substantial aesthetic and infrastructural overlap (see Bordman Reference Bordman2001; Kenrick Reference Kenrick2010; Woll Reference Woll1991). Similar assumptions color most of the book's narration. Whether describing Bolger's hungry consumption of a “mix of high and low culture,” touting the young George Balanchine (a frequent Bolger collaborator) as “the hottest ballet choreographer in [Depression-era] New York,” or highlighting Bolger's achievements in the dubious subgenre of “Irish tap dancing,” Van Leuven generally overlooks the nuanced interactions between the variously classed, racial, and generic formations of Bolger's world (27, 78, 48).

The text's rhetorical strategies may seem stylistic, but they demonstrate a shaky awareness of relevant scholarly literature. For that reason, we might question the disciplinary stakes of the book's attempted project. Consider the goals toward which Van Leuven orients her research: she writes vividly and in great detail to ward off “the consequences of forgetting” Bolger's value as an entertainer (as one of the book's epigraphs puts it). Accordingly, she frames the book's foray into new archival territory as an important aspect of this corrective project. Bolger's story is, for Van Leuven, forged by an upbringing in “a staunch Irish Republican working-class family in Boston,” circumstances which “shaped both his politics and his dancing style in equal measure.” Taken together, these facts motivate a study designed to illustrate Bolger's enduring social significance. After all, as Van Leuven contends, his work mattered greatly not only to “the everyday people who made up his audiences,” but also to “the histories of the most important popular media for most of the twentieth century” (2, 6). All of these tropes seem to root More than a Scarecrow in the project catalyzed by earlier critical biographies of American commercial-dance luminaries—critical-dance-studies interventions like Brenda Dixon Gottschild's Joan Myers Brown and the Audacity of the Black Ballerina (Reference Gottschild2012) and Waltzing in the Dark (Reference Gottschild2000), Constance Valis Hill's Brotherhood in Rhythm, and Cholly Atkins and Jacqui Malone's Class Act. These works fiercely write their protagonists into histories of American commercial performance, driven by a disciplinary interest in challenging the marginalization and exclusion of certain people, cultures, and dance practices from official recognition and protection.

Van Leuven's description of her work signals a similar agenda, deliberately or otherwise. Yet, though it would assume the responsibility of a critical historical project, the book's content remains unimplicated by the demands of such a project. If Bolger is actually the victim of an unjustly written history, Van Leuven might attempt to understand what choices and intentions produced his absence from historical memory. Similarly concerned scholars of dance have long since theorized the politics of both performance and its histories: take, for instance, those works which describe tap's emergence from contact between Africanist and Irish dance practices (see Emery Reference Emery1989; Hill Reference Hill2000); so-called modern dance's strained relationship with commercial variety entertainment (see Foulkes Reference Foulkes2003); or both forms’ ongoing attraction and repulsion to European classical dance (see Franko Reference Franko2002). These studies all address issues raised in Van Leuven's books, but seem to have little influence on it. Together with the frequent elisions described above, the resulting work pressures more than a preference for a particular mode of scholarship or political affiliation. Van Leuven resists acknowledging the indeterminacy of Bolger's context, and thereby (a la Gottschild) invisiblizes his influences in the rush to consecrate his legacy (Gottschild Reference Gottschild1996). If, as Van Leuven states, the “substance” of commercial entertainment often “reflect[ed] the world the actors lived in offstage,” we might wonder why Bolger's work seems so neatly separated from that world—and, by extension, why that world teems with figures more like than unlike him (68). (This expanded approach would also enrich her exploration of Bolger's brushes with electoral politics. Though Van Leuven identifies Bolger's conservatism as an important aspect of his life and work, she limits discussion of the topic to the book's tenth and final chapter.) Ultimately, conventional assumptions about American commercial dance do not compromise, but in fact bolster Bolger's story as Van Leuven understands it.

Yet, even in its focus on Bolger as a singular figure, the book leaves the substance of his legacy open to question. Having weathered the growth of vaudeville, revue, musical comedy, sound film, and television variety shows, Bolger's career inevitably suffered ebbs and flows. Just how much Bolger did nor did not stand out in his field is one of Van Leuven's guiding questions, and More than a Scarecrow tracks his rise and fall with care and honesty. Unfortunately, without the support of a robust theoretical framework, the text only barely substantiates a claim to Bolger's artistic and historical significance. For instance, what sorts of skills, training, and experimentation comprised Bolger's unique fusion of “technical talent,” “topical material,” “electrifying personality,” “unique and impressive physicality,” and “self-deprecating persona” (45)? Van Leuven sketches a provisional outline of his training history—dance challenges in the streets of Boston, a smattering of ballet—but mostly attributes these characteristics to Bolger's “spontaneous” or “extemporaneous” performance approach. How she registers this quality—why it was successful in some contexts and why it inhibited Bolger in others—is much less clear. Ultimately, without this level of detail, Van Leuven undercuts a serious consideration of Bolger as an enduring artist. As she states near the end of the book: “Throughout his career, Bolger's primary interest remained to entertain. He knew what he did well, and he wanted to keep doing it.… Sometimes, he decided he wanted to be more comedian than dancer; at other times, he wanted to be more dancer than comedian. But his purview never stretched much further than that” (174).

What could we learn from Bolger's tricky negotiations between two skill sets? Missed disciplinary opportunities reemerge here to suggest how understanding Bolger as both “dancer” and “comedian” would lend Van Leuven's evaluations a considerable amount of generosity. Critical dance scholars have convincingly pushed for a recognition of the technical demands all dance forms make on their practitioners, even (perhaps especially) for popular, vernacular, and/or commercial dance forms (see Gottschild Reference Gottschild1996; Dodds Reference Dodds2011; Foster Reference Foster, Crary and Sanford1992; Monroe Reference Monroe2011); from this perspective, Bolger's work as a hoofer figures as more than a reliance on foolproof tricks. This fact, in turn, begs rigorous examination of the performer's stage antics. Choreographic analysis would likely yield a richer answer to the question of Bolger's “star” quality. It would certainly offer Van Leuven even more chances to enhance the book with lively depictions of Bolger's stagecraft, but it would also help readers glimpse how Bolger wielded his skills in ways that other performers did not. A corporeal rendering of Bolger's dancing would reveal how critics and peers could, by watching Bolger work, know he was an exceptional performer. The numerous photos and letters referenced throughout the text could easily facilitate such an analysis: they capture many of the production practices Bolger encountered and articulated throughout his career, and could be read with a strategic view toward Bolger's agency within them.

Without this information, though, Bolger's narrative feels anchored by his work in The Wizard of Oz, around which much of the book's explication revolves. In fairness, More than a Scarecrow takes on an understandably difficult task; it tries to honor the legacy of a known yet underappreciated performer, even as it tries to complicate that legacy. Van Leuven scores some notable successes on this count, especially by emphasizing the degree to which Bolger's wife, Gwen, dictated the finer points of her husband's career. Many of the comedian's signature looks, gags, and roles only manifested because Gwen had the foresight—and creative ability—to discern their suitability within the broad arc of Bolger's career (174). By decentralizing the concept of “creation,” the book models an exciting challenge to the stable notions of authorship still at work in much dance, theater, and performance studies scholarship. What's more, such a project would pose a substantial confrontation to the historical erasures Van Leuven evokes in her justifications for the book. Overall, though, More than a Scarecrow remains committed to a “great-man” vision of performance history—a commitment which, ironically, diminishes the life of an eminent entertainer.