Spread a Little Happiness: THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS OF THE BRITISH MUSICALby Sheridan Morley (Thames & Hudson: $29.95; 221 pp.)

Writing a history of the British musical is a bit like writing a history of the vice presidency of the United States; each has gone on for a long time, each has had its distinguished moments, and great figures have contributed to them, but in the end, the real action was mostly elsewhere. To succeed in writing about the British musical, one would have to be a conjurer, summoning up the look, the feel, the breathing life of the thing as it appeared and mutated on the stages, and in the rehearsal halls and theatrical offices, of England through the decades. It wants accuracy and detail, but more than that, it wants an anecdotalism that is considered, vivid and apt.

“Spread a Little Happiness: The First Hundred Years of the British Musical” is by Sheridan Morley, arts editor and drama critic of Punch, author of several theatrical biographies and son of distinguished actors Gladys Cooper and Robert Morley. The book reads like a pleasant occasional history of its subject. It mentions the major personages, events and trends, and if you know nothing of the British musical, you will come out knowing something. But with few exceptions, however, that something will not be much, because the book deals with few things in any but the most cursory manner. Little is explored or detailed; rarely is Morley’s analysis stimulating or trenchant. In short, it seems a bit tossed off, as if the author were too preoccupied to focus fully on his subject.

Let’s take Binnie Hale, who was one of the brightest stars of the British musical in the ‘20s and ‘30s. There is a smashing photograph of her in the book, performing the part of the heiress disguised as a parlor maid in “Mr. Cinders” in 1929. Insouciant eyes, bee-stung lips, torso in perfect composure, her long arms and an endless, sexy, stockinged leg swing out in opposite directions on the same plane--she seems like the incarnation of Zen Whoopee. Yet the mentions of her in the text, all fleeting, give no sense of her at all. Where did she come from? In what tradition was she molded? What did she look or sound like? In short, who was she, and why was she so popular? The picture tantalizes, the text disappoints.

Then there are the shows themselves. Morley may tell production details of one kind or another, and quote reviews, even give a bit about the social significance of a show, but almost never do you get much sense of what a show was like. “Chu-Chin-Chow,” of World War I vintage, was one of the greatest successes ever to hit London. When you finish reading about it, you know that with its huge poster campaign, it “marked the beginning of the modern mass merchandised musical,” what some of its costs were, the probable reason London audiences took to it, and that it was unexportable and unrepeatable. But what was it? What did it look and sound like? Plot? Lyrics? Morley says that its real importance lay in its spectacle. Well, what was the spectacle? He gives us lots of bathwater and no baby.

An entire chapter, “The Twenties,” just seems to mark time. Morley says that was what the British musical was up to at the time, relying on Broadway Jazz Age imports and Old World operettas to fill London’s stages. He seems so bored with it all, he can barely muster up the energy to write about it. Even the description of Noel Coward’s tri1970106472end flies only about half mast. One thing about ennui is that it’s catching; it caught me.

When Morley does rouse himself, he gives an indication of what “Spread a Little Happiness” (ugh, that title) might have been. He does real justice to Jessie Matthews, the elfin musical comedy star of the ‘30s. A brief description of her singing “Dancing on the Ceiling” from “Evergreen,” with the lyric, a quotation from her on her battles with the creators of that show, mention of her personal problems, a comparative analysis of her stage presence, and he has her.

Film director Victor Saville’s line, “she had a heart, and it photographed,” puts a button on it, memorably. The tribulations surrounding the production of Noel Coward’s biggest flop, “Pacific 1860,” are well detailed, and there are a few thumbnail appreciations of shows like “Valmouth” and “The Hired Hand” (most of the time, though, he relies on quotes from the original reviews to give us a notion of what shows were like, as in the cases of “Nymph Errant” and “Blitz;” such writing may be good, but it’s not his, just a cut and paste job). Morley does offer a full and balanced appraisal of the talents of that most English of musical comedy creators, Ivor Novello; the essence of his vast appeal, and its limitations in all their particulars, are covered piecemeal in chapters about the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. To Morley’s credit, a chauvinistic sense of pride in the recent ascendance of the British musical does not blind him to some of the infelicities of “Jesus Christ, Superstar” or “Evita,” or the shoddy theatrical gimcrackery of “Starlight Express.” He has a healthy sense of fear that current theatrical practices may not be leading the musical down paths to a healthy future.

I’m really looking for good things to say about the book, but they are not coming easily. I learned a bit, and some of it is well written, but at $29.95 for a 221-page book with lots of pictures, there is not enough there, and what there is, is not, as Spencer Tracy would say, “cherce.”