Pamela's First Musical

Eloise meets Auntie Mame in this giddy whirlwind tour of Broadway, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wasserstein's first picture book. For her eighth birthday, Pamela's glamorous Aunt Louise, ""a perfectly perfect person,"" whisks her into Manhattan to a matinee (after lunch at the Russian Tea Room, of course). The curtain rises on an over-the-top musical extravaganza filled with chorus lines 100 dancers strong, tap numbers, fabulous costumes, sets as huge as an MGM lot, and an outrageously corny boy-meets-girl plot, all told from a child's perspective (""When he sang, he opened his mouth extra wide, and Pamela could see that he didn't have a single cavity""). Jackness, a noted set designer, produces illustrations as hyperbolic as the featured play. Splashing across the pages in a frenzy of candy-colored lights, his watercolors capture the hustle and bustle of the performance. The story is overlong, and while many may agree with Pamela that her romp is ""most splendiferous,"" others may find the tone and the allusions to real-life Broadway personalities slightly arch. It's also ironic that a playwright as known for realism as Wasserstein relies on wholesale exaggeration to convey the magic of the theater. Ages 5-10. (May)