Blog

01.27.15

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Characters

By Peter Filichia While at Barnes & Noble to get Jeremy Aufderheide’s How the Wiz Was, my eye fell on Stephen Covey’s best-seller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Well, a little bit of self-help never hurt anybody, so I picked it up and skimmed. Habit One deals with “moving from dependence to […]

01.21.15

The Making of No, No, Nanette 44 Years Ago

By Peter Filichia Forty-four years ago this week, Broadway was hit by a hit that changed the course of musical theater. In the twenty years before the 1971 revival of No, No, Nanette, eleven commercial musical revivals had opened on Broadway. In the twenty years following Nanette’s smash critical reception and financial success, […]

01.13.15

Remembering Gwen Verdon

By Peter Filichia Had life been kinder to all of us, Gwen Verdon would still be here to celebrate her 90th birthday on January 13. Alas, we lost her 14 years ago, but at least we still have her recordings as well as a film in which she recreated her first starring role in […]

01.06.15

Elvis Can Still Be in the Building

Elvis Can Still Be in the Building By Peter Filichia Eighty. Yes, eighty. That’s how old Elvis Presley would have been on Thursday, January 8, 2015. Do the math: The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll — as Presley was […]

12.30.14

A Tale of Three ANYTHING GOES

By Peter Filichia We can’t let 2014 got by without acknowledging that the year marks the eightieth anniversary of Anything Goes. I’m a little late to the party, for the Cole Porter shipboard classic actually debuted on Nov. 21, 1934. It’s lucky it didn’t have to postpone until 1935, for its original Guy […]

Peter Filichia On Masterworks Broadway

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.