Background and Analysis
The musical contains several songs built around a group of machine politicians. In "Politics and Poker", Republican machine politicians try to pick a congressional candidate in a district they consider hopeless, while playing a game of poker, and compare politics to poker. The lyric is set to waltz tempo "to underscore the frivolity of their cynicism." In "The Bum Won", these same politicians commiserate with one another after LaGuardia has won the election without their support. In "Little Tin Box", they imagine a series of Tammany politicians attempting to explain to a judge that their wealth came from their scrupulous habits of saving ("I can see Your Honor doesn't pull his punches/ And it looks a trifle fishy, I'll admit,/ But for one whole week I went without my lunches/ And it mounted up, Your Honor, bit by bit./ Up Your Honor, bit by bit.")
In "I Love a Cop", woman factory worker describes her hapless situation of having fallen in love with a policeman who was called out against a strike by her union; "The Name's La Guardia" has LaGuardia campaigning in English, Italian and Yiddish. There is also a ragtime number, "Gentleman Jimmy" about bon vivant mayor James J. "Jimmy" Walker, and the comic "Marie's Law", in which Marie proposes a "law" about how husbands should treat their wives. ("Every girl shall have a honeymoon, which will last at least a year,/ During which aforesaid honeymoon, every care shall disappear…".)
Besides the inevitable invention of some peripheral characters, the musical plays a bit fast and loose with some basic facts of LaGuardia's life. In fact, LaGuardia's first wife, Thea, died after only three years of marriage, but the fictional Thea lives another eight years, so that her death can be one more calamity during LaGuardia's unsuccessful 1929 mayoral campaign; also, the script downplays LaGuardia's generally successful congressional career to make him seem more of an outsider and increase the triumph of his eventual mayoral victory in 1933.
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