Skip to content

Blog

In Praise of Anita Gillette

In Praise of Anita Gillette

By Peter Filichia   What a nice event at the Spiral Theatre Studio last Wednesday night. At Richard Skipper Celebrates, a chat-series helmed by the eponymous raconteur, the ever-charming Anita Gillette was the subject.   Granted, most Americans may remember Gillette from her 20,000 appearances on The $20,000 Pyramid and other game shows. Daytime mavens […]

Original (Bullets over) Broadway Cast Album

Original (Bullets over) Broadway Cast Album

By Peter Filichia   All right, most of us don’t like the semi-recent phenomenon of “jukebox musicals.” And yet, we must admit that far more often than not such shows spur entertaining original cast albums. Maintaining this tradition is Bullets over Broadway.   Woody Allen’s 1994 film – which insisted that a true artist will […]

IF/THEN – RIGHT NOW

IF/THEN – RIGHT NOW

By Peter Filichia   So many of us who are crying out for original musicals are doubly grateful for If/Then – because it gives us two of them.   Bookwriter-lyricist Brian Yorkey doesn’t limit himself to a single story when dealing with Elizabeth (Idina Menzel). Just as A Little Night Music has often been called […]

How Now

How Now, Marlyn Mason?

By Peter Filichia   On Friday, May 16, when the Dow Jones average hit 16,491, I interviewed the woman who’d hundreds of times said that the Dow had hit 1,000.   She was lying. But that was Marlyn Mason’s job in How Now, Dow Jones. She was Kate, “The Voice of Dow Jones” who went […]

Allegro: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Our Town

Allegro: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Our Town

By Peter Filichia Even a splendid production of Allegro, such as the one that Tom Wojtunik is delivering right now at The Astoria Performing Arts Center, reveals a show that really should be heard and not seen.  Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first failure has a terrific score. Many of us suspected as much in the latter […]

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.