La Guardia’s Politics of the Heart

Much may have changed in New York City politics in the decades since the namesake of the 1959 Broadway musical “Fiorello!” governed the city. But the attributes that define a strong musical-theater hero--just like those that define a stellar civic leader--are still the same.

Few of the men who have held the top job in Manhattan would qualify as heroes, but Fiorello La Guardia, who served as the city’s mayor from 1934 to 1945, was a glorious exception, remembered to this day for his courage and reformist zeal. Much more than the “little flower” his name suggests, he was an outsize politician with a persona and personal history as compelling as his agenda.

“He felt so strongly about what he believed in that he was not to be dismissed or relegated,” the musical’s composer Jerry Bock, 71, said in a phone conversation from his suburban New York home. “He was hardly bland, beige, unrecognizable. He was a maverick. He just seemed so dynamic and so . . . musical.”

“He was all black-and-white, no grays,” adds Bock’s collaborator, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, 75, in a separate call from New York. “As it happens, his values were my values, so that didn’t bother me. There’s an enormous amount of cynicism now, because we’re faced with such greed and dishonesty. But what’s an additional irony is that every mayor since La Guardia has claimed that they were covering themselves in his mantle.”

“Fiorello!,” with book by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott, opens Wednesday in a concert staging by Reprise! Broadway’s Best in Concert, at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, directed by Glenn Casale. Tony Danza plays the title role, which launched the career of its originator, Tom Bosley.

“Fiorello!” was a breakthrough success for Bock and Harnick, winning the best musical Tony Award, as well as the Pulitzer Prize, in a year that also included “Gypsy” and “The Sound of Music.” Yet it is rarely revived, perhaps because its subject is not considered universal enough to appeal to large audiences. The creators say that’s a misimpression.

“There is the mistaken perception that it is [only] about New York politics,” Harnick says. “But the thing that attracted George Abbott was that it was two love stories--of Fiorello’s first and second wives.”

Ironically perhaps, the current political climate--and the assimilation of politics into pop culture--may now serve to make the piece all the more poignant. “Now we have a frame of reference for somebody who exposed himself from his heart and was so passionate about things and was hardly circumspect or PC about his office,” says Bock, who also teamed with Harnick on “She Loves Me” (1963) and “Fiddler on the Roof” (1964). “Maybe it [will] resonate more today because we miss a Fiorello.”

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The story takes place over 15 years, early in the politician’s career. It begins when La Guardia’s secretary, Marie, and her friend Dora alert him to the plight of a labor activist named Thea, who has been arrested on a trumped-up charge of “soliciting.”

La Guardia shows his colors as a man committed to egalitarian causes, and decides to run for mayor. He also courts and marries Thea. His success is marred, though, by his wife’s death during his second campaign. Eventually recovered from the loss, he fires the long-devoted Marie so that he can propose that she become his second wife, meanwhile never giving up on his efforts on behalf of the city’s disadvantaged.

The idea for a musical about La Guardia originated with director Arthur Penn, who first recognized the subject’s stage potential while doing research for a television documentary on him. Penn brought the idea to producers Harold Prince and Robert Griffith, who set out to find a composer and lyricist.

Bock and Harnick first joined forces on a 1958 musical about boxers called “The Body Beautiful.” The piece was not a great success, but it did attract the attention of Prince and Griffith, who invited the team to try out for “Fiorello!” by writing some songs on spec.

The duo auditioned with four songs, two of which remain intact in the show: the waltz “ ‘Til Tomorrow,” one of the show’s most famous numbers, and the strike song “Unfair.” The music for a third song, initially discarded, eventually went on to become the basis for the show’s other famous number, “Little Tin Box.”

From the start, the show’s creators were mindful of the need for broad appeal. Harnick believes being a non-New Yorker helped him land the job. “One of the reasons I was hired was that I didn’t know anything about La Guardia,” he says. “I’m from Chicago, and they thought I would latch onto aspects that people would relate to.

“Once I started doing research, I fell in love with the man, not only the theatricality but his values,” Harnick says. “He was a man of great integrity and compassion for the underprivileged. It became a great challenge to put words in his mouth. I had the feeling that La Guardia was sitting on my shoulder and I could hear this high-pitched voice saying, ‘Sheldon, that’s not good enough!’ ”

Apparently, Harnick wasn’t the only one hearing the voice. The tinkering that led to “Little Tin Box” took place during the show’s pre-Broadway tryout. “George Abbott substituted a scene, and we needed a new song,” Harnick recalls. At this point in the story, La Guardia had lost the mayoral race to a corrupt Jimmy Walker, whose political machine sings a song about putting anything it doesn’t want known into “a little tin box.” The song was inspired, Harnick says, by “a photo of one of the officials in Walker’s administration, captioned ‘Little Tin Box.’ ”

Unfortunately, Bock was off seeing a movie at that moment, but the lyricist recalled the music from one of the tryout songs. “The good thing about the song was that it had a lot of 16th notes,” Harnick says. “So I set my lyric to that music. I waited until Jerry came out of the movie and I told him, ‘We wrote a song tonight.’ He liked the lyric, and that night he wrote the [rest of the] music for it.”

Not that “Little Tin Box” was an immediate hit with the cast and crew. “The first two days they were nervous,” Harnick says. “But three days later, I went to the matinee. And from that day on, it always stopped the show.”

“We got a letter after the show had opened, asking where did you find ‘ ‘Til Tomorrow’? It is obviously so purely from the period that I’m curious to know,” Bock recalls. “That was the best compliment, [because it meant] that we had assimilated the time, period, ambience and character to produce the kind of score that sounded authentic.”

Nor have four decades erased Harnick’s and Bock’s willingness to tinker and improve. Indeed, the staging at UCLA will include the first public hearing of a new twist in the score, with orchestration by Reprise! musical director Peter Matz.

“We’re trying an experiment,” Harnick says. “In the second act, there’s a moment where La Guardia is at the depths of his emotional career. Through the years, I never did solve that moment. And when I saw it [in a student staging] at Brandeis a month ago, I thought I finally know how to solve that moment.”

Yet with or without further perfecting, the musical’s combination of personal and social drama helps explain its enduring appeal. “The show remains contemporary because love stories are never out of date,” Harnick says. “People are constantly rediscovering it. But over and above that, there’s the story of a man of integrity. There’s a longing for that kind of figure.”

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“FIORELLO!,” REPRISE! BROADWAY’S BEST IN CONCERT, Freud Playhouse, Macgowan Hall, UCLA. Dates: Opens Wednesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m.; Nov. 14, 7 p.m. Ends Nov. 21. Prices: $45 to $60. Phone: (310) 825-2101.