Inner City — At Last!
By Peter Filichia — How many rock musicals begin with a waltz? All right, the song that starts Inner City will never be confused with a Strauss waltz. It’s a jazz waltz, but it’s in three-quarter time nonetheless. It shows that many of us have a misconception about this 1971 musical – which isn’t quite […]
My Memories of Inner City
My mother, Eve Merriam, wrote the successful but controversial book of rhymes called The Inner City Mother Goose, which became the basis for the Broadway musical Inner City, conceived and directed by Tom O’Horgan, with music by Helen Miller, and starring Blues singer Linda Hopkins. The book (published in 1969) was the result of her […]
The Most Underrated Musical of the New Millennium
By Peter Filichia How well I remember the early morning of Friday, March 15, 2002. I had to go out of town, and my friend Ken Bloom had volunteered to drive me to the airport, even though I was catching an early morning flight. En route, we commiserated on the not-good reviews that Sweet Smell […]
Hello Again to Hello Again
By Peter Filichia If you can get to the always excellent Transport Group’s current production of Hello Again, so much the better. But if you cannot, there’s always the excellent original cast album of Michael John LaChiusa’s 1994 musical that was released shortly after the world premiere. The cast at the Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln […]
You Must Meet My Wife and Life
By Peter Filichia It’s been 38 years now since A Little Night Music opened and Fredrik told Desiree, “You must meet my wife.” Indeed we did, in one of Stephen Sondheim’s most fetching waltzes. “My happiest mistake, the ache of my life,” he sang, giving us a rhyme we might well have seen coming. Oh, […]
