Looking out my newspaper office’s window in Bombay in 1997, I could watch the daily electricity-grid failures as they advanced across the city like storm clouds. A second or two would pass before the generators kicked in at the hospital—surely a very long second or two for patients dependent upon respirators or other life-support devices. Millions upon millions of people, many millions more marching in from the countryside, but scant power. I wondered: Why isn’t somebody building electricity plants? They’d be doing a great human service, and they’d surely make a killing. Somebody was: a remarkable woman named Rebecca Mark, who worked for a company called Enron, today a collapsed corporate star around which a large literature has accreted: financial reportage, editorials, op-ed columns, government hearings, The Smartest Guys in the Room, and, now, the not-quite-a-musical Enron, which recently arrived in New York from London. This brings me to a sentence I had not expected ever to write: This big, showy Broadway production is finely acted and staged, and the song-and-dance numbers are consistently amusing and occasionally inspired, but the play does suffer from an unsophisticated understanding of the pro-cyclical bias of mark-to-market accounting rules. Strangely enough, that ends up mattering, dramatically.

Enronis very good: smart, funny, at times delightful. It could have been—by all rights, should have been—a catastrophe, an unreflective, cartoonish, unthinkingly anti-capitalist jeremiad. But Lucy Prebble’s play is surprisingly lively and intelligent, a very promising piece of work from a