If someone asked you to name the greatest musical of all time, what would you list? "Oklahoma"? "West Side Story"? One of those Andrew Lloyd Webber gagstravazanzas?

May I nominate "The Mulligan Guards' Ball"?

Oh, the latter is not as famous as the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It's not as good as, say, "Fiddler on the Roof." It's not especially universal, either, being based on the New York immigrant communities of the late nineteenth century. Were it revived today, I doubt it would do very well.

But everything has to begin somewhere, and the movement toward modern musicals began -- in a small but undeniable way -- with the plays-plus-songs created by Edward Harrigan (lyrics and book, as we would now put it) and David Braham (music), performed by the team of Harrigan and Hart and their company.

Hence the importance of this book. Harrigan and Hart were a phenomenon in the 1870s, and while some of that was Tony Hart's acting and singing (for a white man, he did an amazing job of impersonating a black woman!), most of it depended on Harrigan giving Hart a role to play and Braham writing music that Hart could sing so well.

Hence the importance of this book. There have been a few attempts to remind us of the importance of the Harrigan/Braham collaboration (collaboration in more ways than one -- Ned Harrigan married David Braham's daughter Annie, and the two families lived side by side for most of their lives). One was a Broadway flop called "Harrigan 'n' Hart." Better remembered is George M. Cohan's song people remember as "H A Double-R I G A N Spells Harrigan," which was written to honor Ned Harrigan although it's not actually about him.

But books are few. E. J. Kahn wrote The Merry Partners about the Harrigan and Hart team, and more recently John Charles Franceschina published David Braham: The American Offenbach (which I have not read). This book, however, is the primary Harrigan biography -- and it is a worthy one. Documented about as well as could be hoped given the rather slight source materials, I felt it gave much more insight than Kahn, and certainly more than the short entries in the other references I've read. And it reads pretty well. I found that I liked Ned Harrigan, and Annie Braham Harrigan, and Annie Yeamans, and most of the crew. I grieved when I read of Tony Hart crying over his wife's coffin, shortly before dying himself. I could feel David Braham's horror as his Stradivarius burned in the ruin of Harrigan's theater. Well, all right, I like musical instruments, so I'd probably feel horror at any early violin burning.... But the point is, this book is both emotionally strong and, as best I can tell, factually strong. Well worth reading.

Now if only someone would republish more of Harrigan's plays! ( )