THIS IS THE LIFE By Peter Filichia
All right, so THE LIFE at Encores! didn’t turn out to be a triumph. What was once the Best Musical of the 1996-1997 season (per the Drama Desk Awards) wasn’t what was on stage at City Center. It had been changed, proving once again that change is good when change is good. To glean what […]
BACK TO THE FUTURE IS BACK IN THE PRESENT By Peter Filichia
Yes, tempus does fugit. When BACK TO THE FUTURE debuted in 1985, it sent the time-traveling Marty McFly to 1955 – thirty years earlier. Now, since its July, 1985 debut, more than thirty-SIX years have passed. Time hasn’t flown for Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, its Oscar-nominated screenwriters. They would have never believed in 2006 […]
PAUL FORD TELLS ALL By Peter Filichia
The first song he ever learned to play on the piano was “A Hundred Million Miracles” from FLOWER DRUM SONG. Well, here’s Paul Ford now, telling, if not a hundred million stories, plenty that have impact. They’re the result of his career as a rehearsal pianist (THE SECRET GARDEN, et al.) and a pianist in […]
TAKE A TRIP BY FLYING OVER SUNSET By Peter Filichia
As you’ll hear from the new original cast album, FLYING OVER SUNSET takes one of musical theater’s most-often-applied rules and does it one better. We’ve often been told that characters in musicals sing when they’re so excited that simple speech simply will no longer suffice. In this recent James Lapine-Tom Kitt-Michael Korie musical, four characters […]
BROADWAY SONGWRITERS HISTORY MONTH By Peter Filichia
We know February as Black History Month, National Bird-Feeding Month and LGBT+ History Month (in the United Kingdom, anyway). It should be Broadway Songwriters History Month, too. To be sure, we could have long earmarked the second month of year for our songwriters, considering that some musical theater giants were born in it. First, Harold […]