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The Best of the New Faces

The Best of the New Faces

By Peter Filichia — Admit it: when you became interested in musical theater and ran into albums for New Faces of 1952 and New Faces of 1956, you automatically assumed that there was a New Faces on Broadway each and every year. No. All in all, there were only seven New Faces, starting with New […]

Astaire Bit!

Astaire Bit!

By Peter Filichia — May 10 marks the 112th birthday of the show business celebrity who’s been named in probably more theater songs than anyone else. All right, I haven’t done a concerted study on this subject, but I’d be surprised if Fred Astaire isn’t in first place in this mythical contest. Was Cole Porter […]

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Getting to Wonderland

It all started on a summer day at home when my parents were driving back from their weekend away. My mom had just gotten a call from Bill Franzblau. (The producer of Little House on the Prairie: The Musical, a tour I had just come back from, and the Executive Producer of this little show […]

Pro and Comden

Pro and Comden

By Peter Filichia — I’ll never forget the day I was at a big musical theater exhibit at the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts. To enhance our experience, the sound system was playing selections from original cast albums. As the music swelled near song’s end of “Make Our Garden Grow” from Candide, I […]

Putting On Your Toes on Your Radar

Putting On Your Toes on Your Radar

By Peter Filichia It opened on April 11, 1936, and MasterworksBroadway is celebrating its 75th anniversary in style. It’s made the first-ever recording of On Your Toes again available. On Your Toes is the story of the son of vaudevillians who goes into teaching instead of performing. But he inadvertently gets involved with gangsters who […]

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.