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Clearing Up Clear Day by Peter Filichia

By Peter Filichia It was the first musical to be denied a Best Musical Tony nomination and yet win the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. Until Aida in 2000, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever was the only show to hold that distinction. Bookwriter-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane had […]

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The Rothschilds’ Rich Score by Peter Filichia

By Peter Filichia For me, one of the great nights of the 2015-2016 season will take place when I saunter into the tiny York Theatre Company that’s nestled in the bowels of the Citicorp Building. Sherman Yellen and Sheldon Harnick have reconceived their 1970 musical The Rothschilds and have turned it into a 90-minute musical […]

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DAMES AT SEA Sails to Broadway by Peter Filichia

By Peter Filichia “As a very young man,” says John Bolton, “I’d already decided that I just had to have every original cast album that had ever been made.” Well, which of us can’t relate to that? So at one point in the ‘70s, the Rochester, New York native went into his local record store […]

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Shirley MacLaine Remembers Her Broadway Roots By Peter Filichia

By Peter Filichia “Regardless of what I have done, seen, and enjoyed, I think of myself as a dancer. It is the essence of my work ethic, my values, and my balance in life.” If you didn’t read the subject line that told you this article would center on Shirley MacLaine, you probably wouldn’t guess […]

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Grammar In, Grammar Out by Peter Filichia

By Peter Filichia I’m not the only one who celebrated Alan Jay Lerner 97th birthday on August 31st. Dozens of others went on Facebook to honor the bookwriter/lyricist of My Fair Lady, Camelot, Gigi, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever — and a few other musicals. More than one Facebooker recounted the story of […]

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.