Y’ASSOU, ZORBA! By Peter Filichia
In 2010, Antonio Banderas announced that he’d appear in a revival but never did. Some years before, Mandy Patinkin was offered the show but wasn’t enthusiastic enough to spur a new production. And for a while in the late 1980s, two Israeli film producersannounced that they’d do a film of this musical. They’d change its […]
A CHORUS LINE: CHANGES, OH … By Peter Filichia
Fifty years ago this week, many musical theater fans were talking about one show and one show only. A CHORUS LINE. It had debuted at the Public’s Newman Theater on April 15, 1975, making many attendees ecstatically happy that they’d finished their taxes in time to attend. What they saw wasn’t quite what Broadway witnessed […]
DAVID H. LEWIS, ARE YOU KIDDING ME? By Peter Filichia
How fitting that I got this book on April 1st, for it does seem to be a fool’s joke. It’s David H. Lewis’ Broadway Musicals: A Hundred Year History, in which he gives opinions on musical theater recordings. Granted, as I recently said, when it comes to such matters, “One man’s MAME is another man’s […]
THE BROADWAY BARBER By Peter Filichia
A century ago this month, people who read Liberty magazine were talking about Ring Lardner’s newest short story. “Haircut” involves a barber who talked and talked while serving a customer sitting in his chair. The 13-page story starts off blithely enough but soon devolves into a dark tale of severe sexual situations and murder. The […]
THE OPERATION IS A SUCCESS By Peter Filichia
Fair warning: this column will appear to be something between a mild shill and a hard sell. But, really, I know you’ll have a better time at OPERATION MINCEMEAT if you hear the cast album in advance. The plain truth is that many of the songs that David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson and Zoe Roberts wrote […]
