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By Peter Filichia – Remember the 1965 film The Great Race? In it, the famous ‘20s daredevil known as The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) is intent on getting lovely journalist Maggie DuBois (Natalie Wood) into bed. He’s got to set the perfect romantic mood, of course, so he must choose just the right music. And […]

By Peter Filichia — Two points before we get to the meat of the matter: Point One: Legendary Columbia cast album producer Goddard Lieberson hated spoken introductions to songs. He believed that people would enjoy them once, but not with repeated playings. He often omitted dialogue in the middle of songs, too, which was really […]

By Peter Filichia — So Ivy Lynn didn’t take those pills and got to play Marilyn Monroe after all. Well, in a manner of speaking. In one of the smartest casting decisions in recent years, Megan Hilty was cast as Lorelei Lee – an iconic Monroe role – in the Encores! semi-production of Gentlemen Prefer […]

By Peter Filichia – Congratulations to all who did so well on last week’s Ancient History Exam. WRix was the first to get the commonality of the 35 songs I listed from 35 different musicals: that in the old days of long-playing records, each of these songs began the second side of the record. That’s […]

By Peter Filichia – During the dog days of summer, there’s little to do, and people tend to get a little lazy. Let’s shake things up with a quiz on ancient Broadway history. Well, not so ancient, depending on your viewpoint. One of the musicals cited here opened (and closed) in 1981. But suddenly that’s […]