In 1977, Barbara and John Ehrenreich published “The Professional-Managerial Class” in Radical America, the landmark journal founded in the 1960s as a mouthpiece for the New Left. Extending Marxist theory, the Ehrenreichs described the emergence of a Professional-Managerial Class or PMC constituted by “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor … [is] the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations” (cited in Schwartz, 2). In the Ehrenreichs' formulation, teachers, academics, social workers, engineers, urban planners, office managers, and other highly trained experts were all members of the PMC. While seductive in its simplicity, the notion of the PMC has drawn criticism over the years from those who find it too abstract in its account of class relations and too reductive in its failure to acknowledge differences of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race.

Michael Schwartz acknowledges many of these critiques in Broadway and Corporate Capitalism: The Rise of the Professional-Managerial Class but nevertheless argues that the concept of the PMC remains useful for analyzing early twentieth-century Broadway plays and audiences. Although his book title might lead one to expect a study of the “salaried mental workers” who labored behind the Broadway scenes as producers, booking agents, talent scouts, translators, stage managers, and the like, Schwartz states that his primary interest is in the “‘fuzzy’ and ‘transitional’ group of manager-experts, the PMC as a whole, including their theatre-going practices and moments of self-recognition—seeing themselves, or broad cartoons of themselves, represented onstage” (6). Drawing on Bourdieu's notion of habitus, he explains that his objective is to identify how the Broadway stage became a site for demonstrating “ways of moving … and ways of acting” (9) to this emergent group of professionals.

After a chapter summarizing the many social and cultural transformations that contributed to the rise of the PMC and the incorporation of Broadway theatre, Schwartz turns his attention toward analyzing three PMC “‘types’ that appear[ed] on, behind, and in front of the Broadway stage: Mr. Nervous, Mr. Grind, and Mr. Can-Do” (12). In “The Problem of Nerves,” Schwartz examines how William Gillette's performance of a cocaine-shooting Sherlock Holmes and Clyde Fitch's twitchy male characters in The City (1909) exemplified George M. Beard's writings on neurasthenia. Burdened by the daily pressures of modern urban life, these characters spoke rapidly and moved in a quick, jerky fashion, projecting their nervousness through their bodies and actions. In Chapter 4, “Muckraking the Playing Field: Emerging PMC Class Consciousness,” Schwartz analyzes a series of productions set on or around the college football field in which the intelligent but physically uncoordinated, socially awkward grind character became a source of laughter and a warning against overcivilization. He concludes the chapter with a brief discussion of The Lion and the Mouse (1905) and The Boss (1911), two plays that followed the lead of muckraking journalists in exposing the problems of modern business practices. Chapters 5 and 6 look at the figure of Mr. Can-Do, a new modern hero capable of negotiating the physical and intellectual challenges associated with the business world, seen most vividly in the figures of George M. Cohan and Florenz Ziegfeld, as well as in the many successful productions they brought to Broadway.

As this brief overview suggests, Broadway and Corporate Capitalism covers a great deal of theatrical ground, providing thoughtful analyses of a number of productions that are often overlooked in conventional histories of the twentieth-century American stage. This is undoubtedly one of the book's great strengths. There are, however, several theoretical and methodological weaknesses that prevent this book from realizing its full potential, the most troubling of which is its failure to engage with contemporary theories of whiteness and masculinity. It is in this respect where the limitations of the PMC as a category for historical analysis become all too clear. While Schwartz charts a transition in gendered behavior from the posturing of the Victorian gentleman to the confident bravado of Cohan's heroes, he tends to attribute these changes to the establishment of a cohesive class identity with limited consideration of other factors such as the women's rights movement or anxieties about racial miscegenation. Key histories of American masculinity, such as Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization and John F. Kasson's Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man are notably absent from the bibliography, while Laura Mulvey's term “to-be-looked-at-ness” is used incorrectly in an analysis of the Ziegfeld Girls. Several methodological issues also arise, most notably Schwartz's unsupported claim that plays such as Fitch's The City and other “plays of nerves and neurasthenics stirred the beginnings of class consciousness of the emerging PMC” (75). An overreliance on quotations from secondary sources also affects the flow of the writing and the clarity of the argument. Despite these shortcomings, however, Broadway and Corporate Capitalism is commendable for its attention to class relations and its examination of plays often dismissed by historians as trite or frivolous.