New Yorkers are electing our 111th mayor today, which seems a good day to look back at mayors who made it to Broadway. I mean as characters (or caricatures), but at least one actually wrote for Broadway, as you’ll see below.
It should be unsurprising that Broadway would feature mayors of its hometown, and there have been plenty of peripheral/generic/fictional NYC mayors on stage, going way back to 1850, in “She’s Come! Jenny’s Come!” inspired by the highly-publicized New York debut of “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, as well as in “Manhattan Mary” (1927), about a girl from Manhattan slums who becomes famous in the Folies Bergere, and “Newsies: The Musical”(2012), inspired by a strike of newspaper boys. “If/Then” (2014) featured a deputy mayor of New York City.
But if New York, as E.B. White put it, can bestow the gift of anonymity, it is also famous for big names and big mouths, including several mayors. Whole shows have been built around some of them.
The most successful of these is “Fiorello!,” a 1959 musical by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (the team that later created Fiddler on the Roof), with a book by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott, who also directed the original production, at the tender age of 72 (he lived to be 107.) “Fiorello!” tells the story of Fiorello LaGuardia’s pre-mayoral career and love life, before his triumphant fight against Tammany Hall, the corrupt political machine that long had dominated New York City. In one song, the party hacks sing of the similarities between their chosen career and their main pastime:
Politics and Poker
Politics and Poker
Shuffle up the cards
And find the Joker
“Fiorello!” won the Tony Award for best musical, and is one of only ten musicals to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was the first musical to be performed at the Encores! concert series in 1994, which then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attended, with a speech comparing himself to the Little Flower. “Like me,” Giuliani said, “he was elected on a fusion ticket, he was Italian-American, and he inherited a city treasury that is broke.” Maybe so, but no known musical theater writers are working on “Giuliani!!” (Two decades later, Encores celebrated its 20th anniversary with an encore of “Fiorello,” which then-Mayor Bloomberg did not introduce.)
A decade after “Fiorello!”, the man he defeated also got his own musical: “Jimmy,” a 1969 musical with music and lyrics by Bill and Patti Jacob and a book by Melville Shavelson and Morrie Ryskind,, based on Gene Fowler’s biography “Beau James,” told the story of James J. Walker, the debonair, Jazz Age-era leader of New York. was, yes, corrupt, but he was also a Broadway songwriter, best-known as the lyricist for the 1906 hit, “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May? “
And twenty years after that, Fiorello was back on Broadway, with “Hizzoner,” a solo show starring Tony Lo Bianco as LaGuardia, which ran for just twelve performances.
“Hizzoner” was produced in 1989, which marked Ed Koch’s last year as mayor. His term in office had already been musicalized in “Mayor,” with songs by Charles Strouse and a libretto by Warren Leight adapted from Koch’s book of the same name. It ran for 70 performances.
Strouse also composed the score for “Annie,” and while the original production only featured a president, — here’s a stretch – the 2014 film adaptation added a character named Will Stacks, a billionaire and NYC mayoral candidate, who initially uses Annie to help his campaign.
There have been actual mayoral candidates portrayed on New York stages. In Harvey Fierstein’s solo show “Bella Bella,” Fierstein himself impersonated the fiery Bella Abzug, an activist who surprised people when she launched her first political campaign, for Congress. “So many people asked if I was really running that I had buttons made up: ABZUG-LUTELY!” Fierstein sets the play during her political campaign – for the U.S. Senate, which was a year before her campaign to be the Mayor of New York City. Bella never made it to City Hall, and Bella Bella never made it to Broadway.
I would be remiss to leave out the man who was dubbed “The Broadway Mayor,” John V Lindsay, who as mayor in 1973, performed in the Broadway musical “Seesaw” for seven minutes during a single performance. Several Broadway luminaries, including Bock and Harnick, Kander and Ebb, and Stephen Sondheim, also wrote songs for the mayor to perform at the annual Inner Circle dinner, a charity even run by the New York City Hall press corps. But that’s not how he earned the appellation. It was because of his support for the industry, helping to create the Special Theater Zoning District and the TKTS discount ticket booth.
