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Parenthetically Speaking

Parenthetically Speaking

By Peter Filichia — Even before I started listening to Musical Comedy Favorites by Andre Kostelanetz, I was intrigued by the song listing. You do know Kostelanetz, don’t you? He was an orchestra leader (1901-1980) who liked to go heavy on strings and provided much “easy listening” long before that term came into being. His […]

Bleecker on Broadway

Bleecker on Broadway

By Peter Filichia – Roxie Hart, let alone Mrs. Lovett, wasn’t the first musical theater woman to have blood on her hands. Annina was in The Saint of Bleecker Street. Granted, there were two profound differences between the leading female characters of Chicago and Sweeney Todd and Annina. One is that the blood on the […]

Liberty Musical

Liberty Musical

By Peter Filichia — If all had gone according to plan, I would have written and posted this column — marking a sixty-second anniversary — last Tuesday. Don’t blame me: I’m not the one who postponed the opening of Miss Liberty from July 4, 1949 to July 15, 1949. What a shame, too, that a […]

Musical Pictures of Edmund Kean

Musical Pictures of Edmund Kean

By Peter Filichia — You may know Song of Norway, for which Robert Wright and George (“Chet”) Forrest adapted melodies from Norwegian classical composer Edvard Grieg. In the ‘40s, it ran two years and was eventually made into a feature film. You undoubtedly know Kismet, for which the same Wright and Forrest adapted melodies from […]

Frankly Frank

Frankly Frank

By Peter Filichia — There was a good deal of talk last week about the change in cigarette packaging. Terribly graphic images are now to be put on the labels. Why couldn’t this have happened decades ago? We might have got a great many more shows from Frank Loesser. All right, we couldn’t expect that […]

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.