The Best Featured Musical Actresses That the Tonys Missed
By Peter Filichia — Been busy the last week? Of course you have, with all the e-mailing, texting and – last and now least – phoning you’ve done to many friends and relatives. The subject: the 2011-2012 Tony nominations. As in the past (and as will be in the future), you and yours have agreed […]
May You Have a Musical Theater May
By Peter Filichia — Tra-la! It’s May! The lusty month, as Queen Guenevere once taught us in Camelot. When the last day of April concludes, many of us find this marvelous musical theater song coursing through our brains. Perhaps bookwriter-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner was giving us a subtle hint here of what was to come […]
The Loos Woman Who Observed That Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
By Peter Filichia — She wrote a play called Happy Birthday, so why shouldn’t we wish her one? Granted, Anita Loos, born April 26, 1888, is no longer with us. For that matter, Happy Birthday isn’t, either. But it was obviously a good enough comedy for Rodgers and Hammerstein. In their producing career, they were […]
A Chat with Florence Henderson
By Peter Filichia – Florence Henderson may be known as Carol Brady to millions upon millions, but to those of us who follow Broadway, she’ll always be the leading lady of four musicals that she did in New York from 1952 through 1964. Lately, Henderson has been touring the country in Florence Henderson: All the […]
Julie and Carol: So Nice, They Did It Twice
By Peter Filichia — Julie Andrews played Maria von Trapp on stage two years before she started filming The Sound of Music. Well, at least in a manner of speaking. Andrews actually portrayed a parody version of the would-be nun who became a wife and multiple mother. She was Mama Pratt in the sequence “The […]
