¹ To be fully open about such matters, I also have written a book in this series, and, thus, I will refrain from singing the praises of the effort as loudly as I otherwise might. Instead, I will merely say—with a slightly cheerful grin—that the books currently available in the series are important contributions to the study of musical theater.

² The most important book on Show Boat was Krueger, Miles’s landmark “Show Boat”: The Study of a Classic American Musical (New York: Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar, which not only proved that such studies were not only possible, but also yielded many important revelations. My Fair Lady has been discussed in Keith Garebian's The Making of “My Fair Lady” (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993). Both shows were featured in Block, Geoffrey’s Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show Boat” to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (New York: Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar.

³ Lerner, Alan Jay, The Street Where I Live (London: Hodder and Staughton, 1978)Google Scholar.

⁴ McHugh used three central archives: the Loewe Collection at the Library of Congress, the Warner–Chappell collection, and the Herman Levin Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

⁵ See Riis, Tom, Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890–1915 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Armond, and Fields, L. Marc, From the Bowery to Broadway: Lew Fields and the Roots of American Popular Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

⁶ For the complete film, see “Glorifying the American Girl (1920),” YouTube video, 1:34:04, posted by “Kendra Hudson,” August 27, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ8MWvP760o.