On the Night of August 25, 1980, the curtain fell on the premiere of a spectacular new Gower Champion musical, 42nd Street. David Merrick, the show's producer, stepped to the footlights and, amid clamorous applause, silenced the audience to announce that Champion had died just hours before the performance began. With gasps from the audience and tears from the ingenue, Wanda Richert, the era of the classic Broadway musical crashed to a resounding close at the Winter Garden Theatre. Big orchestras, real voices, recognizable books, and intelligent lyrics went out the window, and in came stupendous flops like Dance of the Vampires, Jekyll & Hyde, Thou Shalt Not, The Capeman, and Urban Cowboy. There were, though, notable shows that did, in different ways, succeed in invoking the spirit, if not the reality, of the Broadway musical: Rent, The Phantom of the Opera, the two Wild Partys, Sweet Smell of Success, The Producers, and stunning revivals of three classics -- Carousel, Cabaret, and Follies. Still, the true Broadway musical from the days of Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Merman, Preston, Channing, Fosse, and Robbins was finally dead. Unfortunately, the burial has not yet taken place. In The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen, Ethan Mordden takes the reader to the Broadway musical's wake and is unsparing in his acerbic and witty look at the condition of the corpse. Not content merely to spank the creators of some of these fiascos, Mordden also takes on the critics of our day and splays their bodies across The Great White Way like Sweeney Todd giving a close shave. For anyone who has read Mordden's earlier series of books on The Broadway Musical, this is the capstone or, should we say, "coffin nail." Once more, it's "Curtain going up!," but this time, instead of cheering, Ethan Mordden is throwing rutabagas. Book jacket.