Review of Fiorello! - Critics' Choice

By Jack Helbig
Chicago Reader
May 11, 2006

This 1959 musical about New York's colorful Depression-era mayor is a seldom performed gem: it holds up remarkably well thanks to Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick's ear-pleasing tunes and to Jerome Weidman and George Abbott's well-structured, unsentimental book. The show charts Fiorello LaGuardia's career from young do-gooder lawyer to his election as the mayor who finally broke the back of Tammany Hall. Director Nick Bowling has filled TimeLine's intimate stage with ingenious stage pictures--raised picket signs act as a screen for video clips, for example. And Kevin Hagan's set, a warren of interconnected platforms and cubicles, evokes both the feeling of working in LaGuardia's crowded law office and of living in overcrowded Manhattan. Packed with marvelous musical-theater performers, the cast puts as much energy into the characters as the songs. P.J. Powers turns in a particularly winning performance as LaGuardia.