Word: fiorello
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...PRODUCTION of Fiorello! at Harvard or Radcliffe was only a matter of time, and its timing--in the well-publicized Wake of Watergate--is as might have been expected. For a community as politically pretentious and cleverly cynical as this one, this musical comedy is positively self-indulgent. And in an era when police graft and political embezzlement are no more surprising than that Senate investigation hearings should compete successfully with afternoon soap operas, this tale of Tammany Hall and the maverick politician who, as much as any man could, managed to overcome the forces of evil is a natural...
...Fiorello! is pretty appropriate for election week, being a musical about New York's great Depression-era mayor, Fiorello H. LaGuardia. LaGuardia, it was said, with an Italian father and a Jewish mother, was a balanced ticket in himself; he was so popular he said of the party hacks "I could run on a laundry ticket and beat those political bums." He loved little children and the Fire Department and is chiefly remembered, in New York, for reading the funnies over the radio during a newspaper strike. But the musical isn't nearly as colorful or interesting...
...with Smith out of office, Moses shifted most of his attention from Albany to New York. Fiorello La Guardia was mayor of the Depression-stricken city, and there was no lack of public works that needed building. With money from the New Deal's "alphabet" agencies, Moses went to work. By 1940, he had changed the city's face. Manhattan's West Side Highway, the Harlem River Drive, the Triborough, Verrazano, Throgs Neck and Bronx-Whitestone bridges, not to mention Riverside, Flushing and Van Cortlandt parks, are only a few of the things that eventually owed their...
...pair got together again in 1946 to found the Ballet Society. This became the New York City Ballet in 1948, when the City Center, New York's cultural arm organized under Mayor Fiorello La-Guardia, offered the company a home in its theater, a converted Shriners' Temple. Balanchine and Kirstein had found the setting for their lifework...
...whooping it up at a local saloon -to a recent moment when Dick Cavett made fun of TV talk shows by interviewing Louis, his own poodle. The book embraces one Depression, five wars, five Presidents, and that picture of Rita Hayworth in a black-bodiced, white satin nightgown. Fiorello La Guardia appears, blowing smoke rings with bemused insouciance. So does Nikita Khrushchev, shaking his fist in the face of the U.N., and a dowager named Betty Henderson, hoisting a varicose-veined calf onto a table to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan Opera...