Word: fiorello
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...FIORELLO!, though, is a demanding production and it is impressive that the directors have done as well as they have. The music is ambitious in this show, requiring more complicated counterpoint than most musicals attempt. Nonetheless, the political hacks and the trio of legal clients handle the score professionally, rendering clear and balanced performances...
...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 based on the early career of Fiorello H. LaGuardia up to the start of his successful campaign for mayor of New York City in 1933. His biography is a mere thread of a plot to connect a series of vignettes about fun-loving politicians in the 1920s. In addition to being the best-written parts of the show, these vignettes are irresistable in the way they seem also to satirize recent events. The claims of Tammany officials that they afforded various luxuries on their comparatively modest salaries by saving the pennies earned by, for example, returning empty milk...
...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...