By Robert Viagas
26 Jan 2013

	City Center Fiorello! star Danny Rutigliano with Sheldon Harnick
	Photo by Joan Marcus

Was it difficult to look at others from your generation — Kander and Ebb, and Charles Strouse, et al — having hit new Broadway shows during the '80s and '90s?
SH: Not in terms of competitiveness or jealousy, but when you mention Kander and Ebb, I was envious of the fact that their relationship never broke up as Jerry's and mine had… Yeah, I confess. I was envious.

Well, you got to work with Richard Rodgers…
SH: Oh, I got to work with a lot of other people… Richard Rodgers and Michel Legrand and others… Cy Coleman… So there were compensations.

Which of your post-Rothschilds projects do you think about most fondly? Phantom Tolbooth?
SH: That one I feel very fond of. One of the joys of that was getting to know the author, Norton Juster, who is wonderful man — a delightful man — so that was good. And then there's a project that I've been working on — off and on — for a long time, and I'm going back to work on it. It's based on a Russian play, and it's called Dragons, so I'm going to go back to work on that. And, also the one I mentioned before — Smiling, the Boy Fell Dead, I will be going back to work on that. The other collaboration was not a musical collaboration, but I collaborated with my wife, who's a photographer, and we did a book called "The Outdoor Museum," featuring 90 of her photographs and a lot of my poems. It will be on sale, as a matter of fact, during the run of Fiorello! And, that collaboration was very joyous.

Fiorello! is one of the few award-winning hit musicals from its period that has never had a Broadway revival. Why do you think that is? It's not like there's nobody who could play Fiorello.
SH: Maybe because of the City Center [concert] production years ago [in 1994]. Other than that, I can't explain it. I can't say why it isn't done around the country nearly as much as it should be. I guess there's a feeling that it's parochial, that it's too New York, and audiences across the country may not understand it — which doesn't turn out to be true. There was a production in Chicago, an Off-Loop production a couple years ago, that ran a year-and-a-half. It was very popular there.

Even if you only know Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia from the airport, couldn't he now be just a musical theatre character like the Phantom — or Teyve for that matter?
SH: He's a character. I'm hoping that this City Center revival will do good things for the show.

(Robert Viagas is founding editor of Playbill.com, PlaybillEDU.com and the "Playbill Broadway Yearbook" series.)