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The Roar of the Greasepaint - The Smell of the Crowd – 1965

The Best Featured Musical Actors That the Tonys Missed

By Peter Filichia — Here’s the second of five columns dealing with notable omissions in Tony categories. Last week, I took a look at the women who weren’t nominated for the Best Featured Musical Actress Tony Award for certain performances – and arguably should have been. Now, submitted for your approval, are those men who […]

Inner City – 1971

The Best Featured Musical Actresses That the Tonys Missed

By Peter Filichia — Been busy the last week? Of course you have, with all the e-mailing, texting and – last and now least – phoning you’ve done to many friends and relatives. The subject: the 2011-2012 Tony nominations. As in the past (and as will be in the future), you and yours have agreed […]

May You Have a Musical Theater May

May You Have a Musical Theater May

By Peter Filichia — Tra-la! It’s May! The lusty month, as Queen Guenevere once taught us in Camelot. When the last day of April concludes, many of us find this marvelous musical theater song coursing through our brains. Perhaps bookwriter-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner was giving us a subtle hint here of what was to come […]

The Loos Woman Who Observed That Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

The Loos Woman Who Observed That Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

By Peter Filichia — She wrote a play called Happy Birthday, so why shouldn’t we wish her one? Granted, Anita Loos, born April 26, 1888, is no longer with us. For that matter, Happy Birthday isn’t, either. But it was obviously a good enough comedy for Rodgers and Hammerstein. In their producing career, they were […]

Oklahoma! - Studio Cast Recording 1964

A Chat with Florence Henderson

By Peter Filichia – Florence Henderson may be known as Carol Brady to millions upon millions, but to those of us who follow Broadway, she’ll always be the leading lady of four musicals that she did in New York from 1952 through 1964. Lately, Henderson has been touring the country in Florence Henderson: All the […]

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.