Fiorello!

In his shabby but brilliant 2003 valentine documentary Broadway: The Golden Age, amateur filmmaker Rick McKay interviewed over 100 practitioners of 1950’s Broadway musicals—from marquee legends to deliciously obscure no-names—in an attempt to figure out if the mythology of the post-war American musical was for real. What his eccentric conversations revealed was that the hoary book musical—while often structurally flawed, too credulous and cheesy as Wisconsin dairy country—succeeded based on sheer, unmanufactured talent, a lack of self-awareness and electrifying energy so high-voltage it could light up Pittsburgh (if only Broadway knew Pittsburgh existed). As produced by TimeLine, the rarely seen 1960 relic Fiorello! has all the former problems and, thrillingly, all the latter solutions. Consequently, people who have never understood musicals will hate it, while people who love musicals (a genetic subset), particularly those from the genre’s gilded age, will revel in it.

Detailing the early 20th century pre-mayoral ascent of cheeky New York ballbuster Fiorello LaGuardia (Powers, who true to genre form makes up for his lack of pipes with moxie), Fiorello! gallops through two corrupted decades while making pit stops for LaGuardia’s ladies (Wooley as his first wife, Finnegan as his lovelorn secretary) to belt out a few songs about him. Although TimeLine’s production is a parade of misguided immigrant accents and patriotic bluster, wise director Bowling knows how to use this to the genre’s advantage. So by the time this uniformly wonderful ensemble reaches the show’s finale—with Finnegan and Powers exuberantly scaling a ladder—we’ve long since surrendered.—Christopher Piatt