Let's hear it for the boys of the American musical. No, not the gentlemen of the chorus. This time I mean those tough, growly guys who wouldn't know a chassé step unless it kicked 'em right in the kisser. Guys like that cigar-chomping Republican district leader from the smoky, rotten past of New York City politics: Ben Marino, his name is.
Playing this fog-throated politico in the jaunty new Encores! production of "Fiorello!" and backed by a chorus of slobs identified only as "political hacks," Shuler Hensley offers a reminder as bracing as bootleg whiskey that it's not just the brassy leading dames and love-struck swains who make vintage American musicals so much fun.

There were also those snarling galoots with voices of gravel and feet of lead (not unlike the repertory of hapless, testosterone-charged supporting characters in Sturges and Hawks movies) who cut right through the mushy love stories and gleaming declarations of idealism with blissfully bumbling numbers about what really counts in life.

Think of the rhyming gamblers from "Guys and Dolls" barking out track tips in "Fugue for Tinhorns," or the leg-breaking, harmonizing gangsters from "Kiss Me, Kate," who advised that you "Brush Up Your Shakespeare." Dem's happy memories dose guys gave us, right?

Now, having seen Mr. Hensley's Ben Marino and his back-room cronies put over a sly showstopper about graft and perjury called "Little Tin Box," I can attest that they too belong right up there in the Singing Lug Hall of Fame. (By the way, I thank Encores! for allowing us to see Mr. Hensley in such deliciously antic form after his recent tour de force as the housebound title character of "The Whale.") And like the guys of "Guys" and the hoods of "Kate" they are part of a fraternity that could be made (and had) only in New York.

"Made in New York" might as well be stamped all over this Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning 1959 musical, which opens the 20th anniversary season of Encores! musicals in concert. "Fiorello!" was also chosen in 1994 to inaugurate the first season of this performance series, which has since made itself an essential fixture on the New York cultural landscape.

This double honor feels appropriate. For one thing "Fiorello!," like Encores!, has an exclamation point, and the classic American musical is an exclamation-point kind of art form. (It sings! It dances! It acts!)

And as a portrait of an unstoppable human juggernaut (that would be the three-term mayor Fiorello La Guardia, played here by the suitably spark-pluggish Danny Rutigliano), "Fiorello!" is a celebration of the exhibitionism, egotism and endurance skills that New Yorkers like to think of as their city's own special virtues.

But there's one other trait that makes "Fiorello!" ideal Encores! fare and that makes me happy it's come around a second time, since I missed the 1994 staging. Unlike Encores! presentations like "Chicago" and "Wonderful Town," "Fiorello!" isn't apt to skip over to Broadway and settle into a long run. It exudes an idealistic peppiness, especially regarding its white knight of a hero, that confines it to the era whence it came.

That doesn't mean that "Fiorello!" is without distinctive charms, starting with its bevy of buoyant songs by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, who would go on to the greater glory of "Fiddler on the Roof." And thanks to Rob Berman and the Encores! orchestra, a cast of highly competent singers, and the scene-summoning efficiency of the director Gary Griffin and the choreographer Alex Sanchez, those melodies can be savored firsthand (or first-ear) in all their lively variety.

In tracing the decades-spanning rise of its hero, an energized melting pot of Italian and Jewish descent, the show's songwriters sampled an assortment of period styles, from the political jingle that George M. Cohan immortalized in "Harrigan" (in the witty campaign anthem "The Name's La Guardia") to the sentimental piano-sheet ballads crooned to doughboys leaving for war ("Home Again").

There are also several perky comic songs by and about women in love, frustrated or otherwise, that one associates with the madcap revue singers of the 1950s: "I Love a Cop" (performed by Jenn Gambatese as a union worker whose heart leads her beyond the picket line) and a couple of wry, heart-baring spinster's laments from Fiorello's devoted assistant Marie, played by Erin Dilly. (Ms. Gambatese and Ms. Dilly are winning and polished veterans, but they are leading-lady-style performers, pushing to fill out more eccentric roles.)

As Thea, the Italian beauty that Fiorello courts, wins and loses (to an early death), Kate Baldwin easily ascends the evening's musical peak, with a lush but gentle rendering of "When Did I Fall in Love?" — a ballad that deserves to be heard regularly. And in a role created by Tom Bosley (who won a Tony for it), Mr. Rutigliano runs confidently with a part he would seem to be born for, by virtue of lack of height, power of lungs and sheer force of energy.
Unfortunately single-minded, incorruptible people with a Mission (in this case, to save New York from the moral slime of Tammany Hall politics) tend to lack many arrows in their psychological quivers. And even with a new second-act number (written not long before Bock died in 2010) in which Fiorello bares his soul after losing both his first mayoral run and his first wife, the character remains a gleaming brass instrument with a limited range of notes to play.
On the other hand, if you're going to put on a musical that conflates show business with politics, who better to deliver that lesson than a feisty human trumpet. There's one memorable moment, which defines this show's essence, in which Fiorello instructs a too-genteel all-female picket line of garment workers to raise their voices to sell their cause.

You know, he might well have said, "Sing out, Louise!" But in 1959 those words were being shouted on another Broadway stage by another human dynamo, named Momma Rose and played by Ethel Merman. That was in a show called "Gypsy," which found the neurotic cracks in human trumpets and redefined musical-comedy portraiture for the ages.

"Gypsy" was shut out at the Tony Awards that year. It was "Fiorello!" that tied for best musical with "The Sound of Music," a timely reminder in this awards season that true greatness is seldom accurately measured in plaques and statues. Thank Heaven that Encores! makes it such a pleasure for us to savor the near-greatness of times past and to assess the difference.

Fiorello!

Book by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott; music by Jerry Bock; lyrics by Sheldon Harnick; directed by Gary Griffin; music director, Rob Berman; choreography by Alex Sanchez; sets by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Jess Goldstein; lighting by Ken Billington; sound by Scott Lehrer; concert adaptation by John Weidman; music coordinator, Seymour Red Press; original orchestrations by Irwin Kostal; general manager, Over~Sky Productions; production stage manager, Tripp Phillips. A New York City Center Encores! Production, presented by New York City Center, Arlene Shuler, president; Jack Viertel, artistic director; Mark Litvin Sr., managing director. At City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan; (212) 581-1212, nycitycenter.org. Through Sunday. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

WITH: Kate Baldwin (Thea), Jeremy Bobb (Floyd McDuff), Ray DeMattis (Mr. Zappatella), Erin Dilly (Marie), Jenn Gambatese (Dora), Adam Heller (Morris), Shuler Hensley (Ben Marino), Richard Ruíz (Mr. Lopez), Danny Rutigliano (Fiorello La Guardia), Andrew Samonsky (Neil), Emily Skinner (Mitzi Travers) and Cheryl Stern (Mrs. Pomerantz).