Oxford University Press. Well, lug them over to your dusty turntable, because you're going to want them handy as you wander through the musicals of the 1950's with Ethan Mordden's ''Coming Up Roses,'' a breezy, thoroughly diverting account of how the American musical grew and changed during a crucial decade in its development. It was also the era of McCarthyism, the cold war and white flight to the suburbs, but the author, a Manhattan-based novelist and theater historian, is not in the least concerned with any of the social or political trends taking shape just beyond the theater district. It was a fertile time, perhaps the period in which the Broadway musical was most in sync with the culture. But that's to be expected.
People always go for a delicious pan.
A major service might have been done for readers without access to the cast albums by the inclusion of a compact disk containing a sampling of the show tunes dissected here. But no matter. Mordden is such a vivacious guide that by himself he can make the old shows sing.