For Lo Bianco, La Guardia is a Labor of Love

Tony LoBianco as Fiorello LaGuardia. Photos: courtesy John Capo Public Relations

The Lines Between Actor/Character and Past/Present Blur
By Lauren Yarger

When Tony Lo Bianco takes the stage as La Guardia, he’s not just playing a role. He is becoming an incarnation of Fiorello H. La Guardia, beloved three-term mayor of New York.

Lo Bianco first started portraying the political figure who cleaned up corruption in city hall during his terms from 1934 to 1945 when playwright Paul Shyre approached him to portray La Guardia in the early development stages of Hizzoner. Lo Bianco listened to recordings, watched footage and worked on duplicating the mayor's voice, movement, style and spirit (if you don't remember that, you weren't paying attention in history class when you studied Tammany Hall.)

After years of rewrites and out-of-town trials, the show ran on Broadway in 1984 and in Moscow before Shyre’s death. Shyre challenged his friend to continue on with the research, and as he did (revising the play into La Guardia in 2008), Lo Bianco found that the events La Guardia had faced during his time in public service “parallel our world problems today.”
 

Lo Bianco now has written The Little Flower,  (Fiorello means "little flower" in Italian), a one-man show that has received good reviews in New York and Washington, DC. He gets to play the mayor again, this time with a passionate hope that audiences will learn from history. 

“Í can’t tell where La Guardia ends and Lo Bianco begins any more,” he joked, but he’s serious about anting us to learn from past mistakes, “I strongly believe in this,” he said. 

In a recent performance of The Little Flower presented by MNA Productions, Inc. at New York’s DiCapo Opera Theatre, I noted no fewer than nine issues that La Guardia dealt with that could have been ripped from today’s headlines:

• Affordable health care
• Courts deciding issues, rather than popular vote
• The need for a simplified tax code
• Rising gasoline prices
• Greedy corporations
• Union contracts protecting incompetent teachers
• Enemies using Democracy against us
• Size of the military
• Unemployment and underemployment

"We just don’t learn," Lo Bianco said.

In La Guardia’s day unemployment was seen as a temporary assist (with a maximum of 16 weeks,) Now, “it’s a lifestyle,” he complained, with recipients able to claim for up to at least 26 weeks in most states before extensions. This needs to stop, Lo Bianco said, particularly as people have discovered that it is more lucrative to stay on unemployment, welfare, food stamps and other forms of government assistance than to find a job. And the truth about the situation isn’t getting reported in the news, he said. Elections are won because voters think candidates provide those benefits (or refuse to provide freebies) and common sense isn’t found on the front page, he said. 

Some major news networks (with the exception of FOX, he said) refuse to investigate situations that don’t sync with their politically correct or liberal points of view, he charged. Recent examples he gave included coverage of Black Panther intimidation of voters, election results showing unlikely 100-percent support for one candidate and the lack of investigation into terror attacks on the US Embassay in Benghazi. 

“I don’t know what hope we have if the news (media) doesn’t report,” he said.

He takes his message (and the play) to college campuses and high schools. Groups can use the event as a fundraiser (if you are interested, contact John Capo Public Relations at info@johncapopr.com.) 

The play, written and directed by Lo Bianco, spans the mayor’s 12 years as mayor as well as other public service that included a stint as Republican representative from New York’s 14^th Congressional District and his service during World War I. There also are glimpses into his personal life and two marriages. The actor so becomes the character, that at one point during the performance I attended, a woman became so moved by one of La Guardia’s election-stop speeches, that stood up and applauded as he spoke.
 

Not surprising, given Lo Bianco’s distinguished acting career. He won the Obie for Best Actor for Yanks-3, Detroit 0, Top of the Seventh and was nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Eddie in  the 1983 Broadway production of A View from the Bridge (for which he won the Outer Critics Circle Award). He’s known to movie buffs for roles in “The French Connection” (Sal Boca), “Honeymoon Killers” (Ray Hernandez), “Bloodbrothers," "F.I.S.T.,” "City Heat,” "Nixon,”  "The Juror,“ "Kill the Irishman. He also played Quintillus in the 1977 TV mini-series "Jesus of Nazareth."

Lo Bianco, co-founder of the  Triangle Theater in New York, also is remembered for his role in the groundbreaking 1970s TV series “Police Story” and for his portrayal of Rocky Marciano in the films "Marciano and “Rocky Marciano” – another case of LoBianco’s life connecting with his character. The actor is a former Golden Gloves boxer. 

Becoming La Guardia in The Little Flower has become almost something sacred, for Lo Bianco, however. The actor gets the same “feeling of awe” playing La Guardia as the spiritual experiences he has as a child in church and entering some of the great churches of Europe, he said. 

Clearly the play is a labor of love with serving the public its motivation. Both La Guardia and Lo Bianco agree: “On Judgment Day, it’s not what you did, but what you didn’t do.