Tony Danza–Charles Messinger relationship

Tony Danza’s relationship with his tenth-grade English teacher, Charles Messinger, began in the school theater but reached beyond it: Messinger made the arts feel like an invitation to a larger life. Danza credits his former teacher with inspiring his early wish to teach, and later echoes that generosity when he takes his own students to New York City for a Broadway performance.

The classroom and the stage

Messinger taught Danza English at Malverne High and directed and produced the school’s annual musical theater productions. Danza performed in three of them. In contrast with most of his high-school classes, Messinger’s class was fun; its teacher’s love of the arts shaped the atmosphere as much as the formal lessons did. For Danza, the classroom was a place where performance and learning could reinforce each other.

Messinger brought the world of New York theater into school through stories about performances he had seen at the Belasco, the Lyceum, the Majestic, and Lincoln Center. He spoke of Manhattan as an almost fantastical place. Although Brooklyn and Long Island were nearby, Danza recalls that he and his classmates rarely made the trip; Broadway seemed like another world. Messinger’s accounts made that distance imaginative as well as geographical, offering students a vivid picture of experiences beyond their ordinary reach.

An early vocational influence

Danza remembers Messinger’s enthusiasm as contagious. He once told his teacher that, because of him, he wanted to become a teacher. Messinger accepted the compliment but encouraged him to consider acting instead. The exchange did not erase the teaching ambition; it left Danza with a formative example of an adult who could inspire a student while also urging him toward another possibility.

Years later, Danza understood his eventual return to education as a continuation of an early vocational dream. His account therefore gives Messinger’s influence a particular shape: the teacher did not simply recommend a career, but showed how an adult’s own passion could make a subject—and a possible future—feel immediate to young people.

Passing the experience on

When Danza later wanted to reward his students, he thought of Messinger and the theatrical world the teacher had introduced to him. After securing approval from the school and the television network, Danza arranged a class trip to New York City to see a Broadway matinee of West Side Story. The students’ excitement at the announcement contrasts with Danza’s memory of how distant Broadway had once seemed to him.

Danza explained the musical by connecting it to Romeo and Juliet, a work the students had already studied, and to the Shakespeare-to-street approach used in his class. In that moment, the influence travels forward without simply repeating the original experience: Danza draws on Messinger’s example, then translates it into a bridge his own students can recognize. The trip makes theater accessible not as an abstract cultural landmark, but as a live encounter connected to their learning.

Lasting significance

The relationship links Danza’s student years to his later work as a teacher. Messinger’s theater productions made school enjoyable, his stories enlarged the students’ sense of what lay beyond their neighborhood, and his encouragement helped Danza name teaching as an aspiration. Danza’s effort to bring his class to Broadway demonstrates the lasting force of that example: the gift he remembered receiving became something he deliberately tried to offer to another generation.