"Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre" by Ethan Mordden
The scope of this book allows him to do things that he could not do in the decade-by-decade series. For example, in a chapter titled "The Rodgers and Hammerstein Handbook," he covers all the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows along with others in the 1940s and 1950s that were influenced by them, examining the developments that occurred over those two decades.