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CHITA AND HER ACHIEVEMENTS By Peter Filichia

What does Chita Rivera not have in common with Jean Hersholt, Isabelle Stevenson and Irving G. Thalberg? She didn’t have to die to get an award named for her. Next week, choreographers and dancers will receive Chita Rivera Awards at the Skirball Center. It’ll be one of the two most notable events the legend will […]

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The World Is SHUCKED’s Oyster By Peter Filichia

What started out as a musical variation on HEE-HAW has had the last laugh. SHUCKED was originally inspired by that erstwhile TV series that’s been rarely off the air since its 1969 debut. Although it had clocked more than 350 episodes, in all that time, it was able to receive one and only one Emmy […]

HAIL TO THE CHIEFS! (11)

SWEENEY TODD: 1979 VS. 2023 By Peter Filichia

Wait a minute! Where’s “Johanna”?!? Those who attend the current Broadway revival of SWEENEY TODD and are familiar with the score will miss one of the three songs that happen to have the same name. For those who don’t know Stephen Sondheim’s Tony-winning score for the Tony-winning musical, we don’t mean that there’s one song […]

HAIL TO THE CHIEFS! (10)

FOLLOWING CAMELOT By Peter Filichia

Who knew that “Follow Me” had so many fans? But since Aaron Sorkin’s revisal of CAMELOT started previews at the Vivian Beaumont on March 9, friends have been calling me to complain. “They dropped ‘Follow Me’!” they’ve exclaimed, in voices that registered astonished surprise to outright contempt. Longtime Broadway publicist Kevin McAnarney said that it’s […]

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A FINE ROMANCE WITH SILK STOCKINGS By Peter Filichia

Can you picture Alfred Hitchcock singing and dancing? In A FINE ROMANCE, Geoffrey Block’s excellent new book from Oxford University Press, he mentions that director Rouben Mamoulian actually considered Hitch for the role of a Communist commissar in the film version of SILK STOCKINGS. Of course, that discussion took place sometime after the early 1950s […]

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.