Guys and Dolls (Decca Broadway). If you can’t make it up to the Berkshires to see Barrington Stage’s revival of Frank Loesser’s masterpiece, then grab the CD version of the original-cast album. George S. Kaufman’s still-celebrated 1950 Broadway production is gone with the wind and the movie version was lousy, but the hard-nosed punch of the singing of Robert Alda, Isabel Bigley, Vivian Blaine, and Stubby Kaye was preserved for all time by Decca, complete with George Bassman’s delectably brassy orchestrations. Accept no substitutes! (TT)

Miss Peggy Lee (Capitol, four CDs). One of the three or four top names on the short list of great pop-jazz singers, Peggy Lee was exceedingly well served by this 1998 retrospective of 113 tracks recorded for Capitol in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. All the hits are here, including “Fever” and “Is That All There Is,” plus a sizable helping of her own excellent songs. The liner notes are by Gene Lees, who knew Lee and understood her. The discographical information is sketchy, but you can find out everything you want to know here. If you’re planning a road trip, pack this set (TT).

James Agate, The Selective Ego. You don’t have to be an intellectual to be a great diarist, and Agate, the debt-ridden, spectacularly self-involved drama critic of the London Sunday Times from 1923 until his death in 1947, wrote about the printable parts of his life with careful evasion (he was a brothel-loving homosexual given to masochistic practices of the grossest sort) and colossal panache. This compact selection of entries from Ego, the nine-volume series of diaries that Agate published in the Thirties and Forties, is a superlative bedside book, hugely amusing and easily readable in random snatches (TT).

Support Your Local Sheriff. A wide-gauge western spoof written and directed by William Bowers and Burt Kennedy, who between them made more than their share of dead-serious horse operas. All but forgotten today, Support Your Local Sheriff was one of the sleeper hits of 1969, partly because of the irresistible charm of James Garner as the Maverick-like sort-of-anti-hero and partly because of the perfect supporting cast (Walter Brennan, Bruce Dern, Joan Hackett, Harry Morgan). And guess what? It’s as funny today as it was when I saw it in the theater as a boy (TT).

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. This is the first installment of a two-volume biography originally published in 1995. In it, Guralnick follows Presley through the death of his mother in 1958. Last Train to Memphis might just be the best book ever written about an American musician, and it definitely belongs at the top of the short list of first-rate rock biographies, not just because Guralnick’s research is impeccable but because his gifts as a storyteller are extraordinary. I reread it before starting work on Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong in order to remind myself of how good a musical biography can be (TT).

Topsy-Turvy (Criterion Collection, out Mar. 29). Mike Leigh’s 1999 film about Gilbert, Sullivan, and the making of The Mikado, newly remastered and reissued by the Criterion Collection with all the usual goodies, is the best backstage movie ever made, as well as a surpassingly fine exercise in cinematic time travel. To watch it is to feel closer to the tone and texture of Victorian life than you ever thought possible. Intelligent, provocative, hugely entertaining…what’s not to like? (TT).

Simon Nowell-Smith, The Legend of the Master: Henry James as Others Saw Him. The subtitle says it, but conveys nothing of the elegance and resourcefulness with which Nowell-Smith put together this 1947 anthology of first-hand anecdotes and impressions–all of them carefully verified. To see James through the widely varied eyes of Arnold Bennett, E.F. Benson, G.K. Chesterton, Desmond MacCarthy, H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, and dozens of other contemporaries is to see him with the utmost immediacy, and the results are far more readable, even for pure pleasure, than any volume of this kind has any right to be (TT).

Norman Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered. Snippets and excerpts from contemporary memoirs, interviews, and newspaper and magazine stories, deftly arranged into a mosaic-like portrait of Gustav Mahler that is more readable than any existing biography of the composer. The place to start if you’ve just discovered Mahler’s music and want to know what the man was like (TT).