About the work
Fiorello! is a musical with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and a book by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott. Its 1959 Broadway premiere won the Tony Award for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The show dramatises the life of the legendary New York reform politician Fiorello La Guardia, combining political history with rousing songs and sharp humour – the first major collaboration of the future hit team of Bock and Harnick.
Plot
The pugnacious lawyer Fiorello La Guardia takes on corruption and the powerful party machine of Tammany Hall in the New York of the 1910s and 1920s. He defends striking garment workers, runs against impossible odds for Congress and goes off to the First World War. In private he wavers between his loyal secretary Marie and his first wife Thea. Across election campaigns, defeats and personal blows of fate, the show traces the unwavering rise of a man destined to become the city's most popular mayor – honest, hot-tempered and close to the people.
Cultural significance
As one of very few musicals to do so, Fiorello! won the Pulitzer Prize and stands for the politically engaged, documentary-grounded music theatre of the late 1950s. Numbers such as the backroom "Politics and Poker" and the waltz "Till Tomorrow" display the craft of the Bock/Harnick team, which a few years later would achieve worldwide success with Fiddler on the Roof. The show also preserves the memory of one of the most colourful figures in American urban history.