Happy Eighty-Ninth, Angela Lansbury!
Happy Eighty-Ninth, Angela Lansbury! By Peter Filichia The first three words that Angela Lansbury ever sang in a Broadway musical would in time turn out to be thoroughly inaccurate. “Everyone hates me.” Of course, she wasn’t speaking about herself, but as Cora Hoover Hooper, a character in Stephen Sondheim and Arthur […]
Forty-Five Other Ways to Lose a Man
By Peter Filichia “Forty-five ways to go,” my buddy Ed Weissman wrote after he read my column inspired byWonderful Town’s song for Ruth Sherwood: “100 Easy Ways to Lose a Man.” Yes, although Ruth had claimed that she had “ninety-five ways to go” after she’d inadvertently dissed editor Robert Baker, I could find […]
Ninety-Five Easy Ways to Lose a Man?
By Peter Filichia In Wonderful Town, Rosalind Russell played Ruth Sherwood, a bright if not dazzlingly attractive woman who decries her bad luck with the opposite sex. (You can hear her do it on the 1958 soundtrack of the TV broadcast.) Ruth does admit, however, that many of her problems are of her […]
Celebrating a Fiddler on the Roof Milestone
By Peter Filichia If you’re reading this on Tuesday, September 23, it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the day in 1964 that Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, Jerome Robbins, Harold Prince and dozens of others opened the six different newspapers that New York then had and read the critics’ reviews of their new show […]
IT”S THE LITTLE THINGS
By Peter Filichia “It’s the little things, the little things” Elaine Stritch insisted in Company. And she was right — little things do mean a lot. That’s especially true of those little things we hear on cast albums. In fact, why not start my little list with Stritch and Company? During “Side by […]
