With Leonard Bernstein's centenary approaching in 2018, more books on the musician have naturally started to appear. Two studies of West Side Story (one by Nigel Simeone and one by this author) came out in the last six years, and a recent study by Helen Smith explores his theater works in general. Simeone has also edited a collection of Bernstein's letters, and Alicia Kopfstein-Penk has recently written a book on his Young People's Concerts. Paul Laird, a noted Bernstein scholar, has updated his guide to research with Hsin Lin just this past year.Footnote ¹ Timely, then, is this study of one of Bernstein's lesser-known works, On the Town (and its precursor, the ballet Fancy Free), by Carol Oja. Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War comes from Oxford's Broadway Legacies Series, which includes single-work studies like Jim Lovensheimer's South Pacific volume, Todd Decker's Show Boat study, and Dominic McHugh's book on My Fair Lady. In a similar vein, Oja has explored On the Town in exhaustive detail, looking at the creative genesis of the show (and the ballet Fancy Free, on which it is very loosely based), the racial politics of the work, and, finally, the show's musical style.

The greatest value of this engagingly written and richly documented volume is that it covers, for the first time, some of the most formative influences in Bernstein's theater career, not to mention the entertainment and Broadway worlds of the 1930s through the 1940s. In chapters 1 and 2, Oja traces the work of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Bernstein's collaborators in On the Town, back to their work with the Revuers, a nightclub and radio comedy team that put together some of the most inventive (and hilarious) musical and theatrical work of their time. Not only were they inventive in their comedy, however, they were active in their politics, and one of the book's underlying themes is how On the Town expressed the forward-looking political stance of its creators, especially regarding color-blind casting. In chapter 1, Oja also dissects the Jerome Robbins/Bernstein ballet Fancy Free in terms of its homoerotic overtones, making connections with a famous painting of sailors on shore leave on display at the same time, the intrigues of the relationships among the dancers, Aaron Copland, and Bernstein, and detailed discussion of the aspects of Cuban musical and dance styles in the work.

The book's main subject, however, is On the Town. Although it is a well-known work within the Broadway world, Oja provides a thorough discussion of the show's development, launch, and film adaptation, not as an end in itself but as a “framework” for her discussions of race, representation, and wartime politics. As she writes, “[L]ittle has been known about the issues raised by its inaugural staging and its refractions of life in wartime New York” (85). The major heft of the volume, then, revolves around the topic of race and how it intersected with the production of the show. Chapter 4 is devoted to the casting of Japanese American dancer Sono Osato as one of the lead characters, Ivy Smith. Oja explores in great detail Osato's career (including material from the author's interviews with the dancer), the political problems her father faced as a prominent Japanese businessman in Chicago during a period when many Japanese Americans were interned, and the way Osato's casting flew in the face of standard hiring practices during the tense wartime period. Given the focus on wartime politics, the section dealing with the film, which was produced in 1949, is fairly short, mostly pointing out that many of the songs from the original work (thought too complex for a general film audience) were cut in favor of newly written songs by another composer. It was perhaps thematically wise not to devote much space to the film version, but it would be nice to read more about it in the context of the show's overall history.

Perhaps the least compelling of the chapters is chapter 6, which examines the career trajectories of some of the African American dancers and singers who found work in On the Town but—for many—not as much afterward. Although an interesting read and important for the historical and cultural work that it does, this chapter departs most radically from the title's promise of Bernstein Meets Broadway and slows the book's momentum slightly just before the excellent chapters on the music itself. Indeed, the final chapters of the book treat Bernstein's score in wonderful detail, identifying features of Latin American influence not discussed before in the literature and illuminating the many influences that affected the composer's creation of this, one of his first major theatrical works. Tying it all together is the final chapter, which discusses the nightclub scenes in the show. The characters go from one nightclub scene to the next, from a Latin club to an African American swing joint—roughly the nightclub experiences that the creators themselves enjoyed. Oja explains how all the musical and theatrical influences and pressures on the show are played out as the action at each venue becomes more uninhibited and shows more of the characters’ motivations and concerns. It is almost like seeing a cyclorama of experiences, dance, and musical styles from New York during World War II brought together in a fast-paced scene that ties the threads of the musical together beautifully. Oja chose well in placing this chapter at the end of the book because it ties together her own lines of inquiry.

One of the strongest aspects of this book is Oja's historical method, which reflects the changes in historical research that the internet has made possible. Ranging from author interviews, to newspaper clippings (many of which cannot be identified precisely, due to the nature of clippings files), to records of the immigration service and the U.S. government, Oja's densely documented book shows what can now be found online, which, even twenty years ago, would have been entirely out of reach of the researcher. The citations of ancestry.com, Youtube, the IMDb (Internet Movie Database), and the IBDB (Internet Broadway Database) demonstrate how many facts and recordings are readily at the fingertips of researchers, enabling more rich work to be done in more detail in less time than ever before.

As the first serious study of On the Town and the Revuers, this book has tremendous value for the musical theater historian and Bernstein aficionado. As a study of race relations in the wartime era, it does tremendous work to reveal the nuances of audiences and creators during a period when Jim Crow laws were still in force in many parts of the United States. Perhaps the only criticism of the book is in its title. It is less about Bernstein himself and more about the racial and cultural context in which these works were written; it is less about the war and more about the United States itself. For this, it is a valuable addition to the literature and promises to shed light on more of Bernstein's work in other decades of the century.