This is the sort of book that teaches you just how short life is.

Think about the musicals you know. "Fiddler on the Roof." "The Sound of Music." "The Music Man." Given enough time, you might be able to name a few dozen. At perhaps a dozen songs each, that's perhaps two hundred songs. To be sure, there were lots of musicals that were flops, but there can't be that many flops, right? They'd stop making them!

Then you find this volume and realize how much, much, much more there is. More than you could ever listen to, which is why you need this book.

Despite some hyperbole in the publishers' description, it is not comprehensive, particularly for the earlier eras of musical theater, but it covers more than eighteen hundred songs from more than five hundred musicals. If a song from a musical made it big from at least the 1920s to the 1980s, it's in here, and if a musical made it big, then most of its songs will be here. (Not necessarily quite all of them. Taking "Fiddler on the Roof," for instance, there are no entries for "Now I Have Everything," "Chavaleh," and "Anatevka" -- the last of which, at least, I think quite important. But it has "Tradition" and "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" and "Sunrise, Sunset" and "To Life" and "If I Were a Rich Man" and more.) Each song has a several-sentence entry describing its type, the musical it's from, the author, usually the singer most associated with it, and other odds and ends. The songs are organized by titles; there is also an appendix which lists them by musicals to let you look up all the songs from that musical which are included.

It's not an entirely perfect book. I'd love to see it cite the first line of each song, the key and range and musical mode, and give more about the context. And I wish it concentrated more on the earliest theatre songs, since it's much easier to find out information about the newer material. But within its limits this is a wonderful and interesting and informative piece of work. ( )