Skip to content

Blog

Second-Acting Show Music

Second-Acting Show Music

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “There are no second acts in American lives.” For many of us, there are no second acts when we listen to original cast albums. We get up in the morning and put on a favorite recording. Chances are that if it’s from The Golden Age, we’ll hear a rousing […]

Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy – in Happier Times

Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy – in Happier Times

As of June 25, 2013, the world was divided into two parts. One part consisted of people who couldn’t wait to read Shirley Jones: A Memoir. They wanted to know everything the actress was willing to tell about her adventures with sex, drugs and musical comedy. Until the book’s publication, they’d always assumed that Jones’ […]

The Most Happy Fella – Original Broadway Cast Recording 1956

Global Forgiveness Day on Record

Some of you may have noticed that I did a column on August’s minor holidays the first and second weeks of the month – but haven’t done one since. Why? I took a holiday. But here we are with the final minor holiday of the month. Perhaps it should be a major one. August 27: […]

La Cage aux Folles – Original Cast Recording 1983

La Cage aux Folles: Alas, Jerry Herman’s Last

Was Jerry Herman subtly trying to tell us something in La Cage aux Folles? Note that he saved “The Best of Times (Is Now)” as his eleven o’clock number. No one knew it at the time, but it would be the last new Herman song that would ever be heard on Broadway. Given that Herman […]

A Little Night Music – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack 1978

Send in the Soundtrack of A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

Do you know the term “pentimento”? Many of us didn’t until we read Lillian Hellman’s first memoir, in which she used the word as her title. “Pentimento,” she taught us, was the result of an artist looking at what he’d painted, reassessing a section, changing his mind and repainting what he’d already done. In listening […]

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.