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HAIL TO THE CHIEFS! (11)

SWEENEY TODD: 1979 VS. 2023 By Peter Filichia

Wait a minute! Where’s “Johanna”?!? Those who attend the current Broadway revival of SWEENEY TODD and are familiar with the score will miss one of the three songs that happen to have the same name. For those who don’t know Stephen Sondheim’s Tony-winning score for the Tony-winning musical, we don’t mean that there’s one song […]

HAIL TO THE CHIEFS! (10)

FOLLOWING CAMELOT By Peter Filichia

Who knew that “Follow Me” had so many fans? But since Aaron Sorkin’s revisal of CAMELOT started previews at the Vivian Beaumont on March 9, friends have been calling me to complain. “They dropped ‘Follow Me’!” they’ve exclaimed, in voices that registered astonished surprise to outright contempt. Longtime Broadway publicist Kevin McAnarney said that it’s […]

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A FINE ROMANCE WITH SILK STOCKINGS By Peter Filichia

Can you picture Alfred Hitchcock singing and dancing? In A FINE ROMANCE, Geoffrey Block’s excellent new book from Oxford University Press, he mentions that director Rouben Mamoulian actually considered Hitch for the role of a Communist commissar in the film version of SILK STOCKINGS. Of course, that discussion took place sometime after the early 1950s […]

HAIL TO THE CHIEFS! (9)

UP WITH THE SUN AND MUSICALS, TOO By Peter Filichia

Sometimes we breeze past an “Author’s Note” because we’re so anxious to get to the meat of a book. Don’t do that with Thomas Mallon’s new 337-page tome. “UP WITH THE SUN,” he wrote, “is a fictionalized rendering of Dick Kallman’s life and death. It is inspired by actual events that have been considerably altered […]

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KPOP MUSIC By Peter Filichia

Is KPOP the first cast album in which the booklet’s lyrics are printed in Korean? No. With all the American musicals that have proliferated and profited in South Korea – EVITA and MAN OF LA MANCHA among them – their cast albums have long had bi-lingual liner notes and lyrics. But yes, this two-language set […]

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.