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March Madness: Week Two

March Madness: Week Two

As I wrote last week, if college basketball can have “March Madness,” so can musical theater. My column of February 26 stated that aficionados should spend March going delightfully mad. Each day of the month, they could play as few as one song or as many as found on a cast album that celebrates a […]

Bells Are Ringing – Original Broadway Cast Recording 1956

Get Ready for March Madness

And here it comes: that annual sporting event that’s unashamedly come to be known as “March Madness.” Much of the country will be watching to see which college basketball teams will be part of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s 65-team tournament. Then fans will watch almost non-stop to see which “Cinderella teams” will do well […]

Tales of the City of Angels

Tales of the City of Angels

It’s one of those Tony-winning musicals that doesn’t get done very often – and certainly not enough. But sharp director John Simpkins decided that his students at NYU Steinhardt could do City of Angels – and he was right. If you didn’t catch this production between February 7 and 11, you missed hearing Cy Coleman’s […]

Three OCAs for Those Who Muff Their Mufti Chances

Three OCAs for Those Who Muff Their Mufti Chances

Here’s hoping that you can make it to New York this month and next to see the York Theatre Company’s four “Musicals in Mufti.” Starting this weekend, Mufti – which does readings of musicals without benefit of costumes – will do Two by Two (February 15-17). It will be followed by Hollywood Pinafore (March 1-3), […]

Cinderella – 1957 Television Cast

Cinderella Darling

It’s only played a handful of previews thus far, but I’m hearing wonderful word-of-mouth about the new production of Cinderella at the Broadway Theatre. The score alone would suggest success. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s work on this 1957 TV musical was just about as good as any of their “Big Five.” That, incidentally, is the term […]

Peter Filichia is the theater critic emeritus for the Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey and News 12 New Jersey.

He is a columnist each Friday for www.mtishows.com and www.kritzerland.com.

Filichia is the author of Let’s Put on a Musical, now in its third printing; Broadway Musicals: The Biggest Hit of the Season / The Biggest Flop of the Season and Broadway Musical MVPs 1960-2010: The Most Valuable Players of the Last 50 Seasons. His new book, Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks will be published in May, 2013 by St. Martin’s Press.

He has been a columnist for Playbill, Theater.com, Theatermania and Theater Week.

Before joining the Theatre World Awards in 1996 as host and head of the selection committee, Filichia served four terms as president of the Drama Desk. He has served on an assessment panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, and is currently critic-in-residence for the University of Cincinnati-Conservatory of Music and the musical theater judge for the ASCAP Awards program.