Life upon the wicked stage, wrote Oscar Hammerstein, ain’t nothin’ like a girl supposes. I’ll say. Seventy years on, as if to underline the futility of theatrical aspirations, there now seems to be a distinct actuarial disadvantage. A couple of years back, it was Jonathan Larson dying on the eve of his triumph with Rent. Last month, the author of James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire could have woken up and read a rave review in the Times of his first major New York production. Unfortunately, he didn’t wake up at all: he had fallen into a coma and died later that day. Howard Simon was thirty-seven, more or less the same age as Larson.

When the fates play a trick most contemporary dramatists would recoil from using, it’s tempting to ponder what they mean by it. In 1980, when Gower Champion, with the impeccable timing that characterized his best work, expired a few hours before the curtain rose on the premiere of 42nd Street, it was an apt if freakish finale to a splendid career. In the New York theater these days, the final curtain is as likely to fall during previews—as if to say abandon hope all ye who enter here. In the case of Larson, we were supposed to have been robbed—of another dozen great shows that this promising young man would have written. I didn’t think so: Rent was like Meredith Willson’s Music Man—one of those shows that feels like the