484 stories from Masterworks Broadway
By Peter Filichia --
Went to see Guys and Dolls in Concert at Carnegie Hall. By the time Miss Adelaide sang "A Bushel and a Peck," I once again started wondering why this song " one of the…
By Peter Filichia
It's no April Fools' Day joke: Doris Day will celebrate a birthday on April 1. The reclusive nonagenarian hasn't graced a recording studio since 1967 or a film since 1968. …
By Peter Filichia
All right, so Elvis Presley wasn't a Robert Goulet fan. That much could be inferred after the so-called King took out one of his many guns and assassinated a television set…
Last week, while writing about The Mikado, I started thinking that I, like Ko-Ko, should make a little list, too.
The Best Musicals? Too trite. The Best Cast Albums? A little better, but ho…
By Peter Filichia
So what can we all do on March 14th to mark the 129th anniversary of the opening of The Mikado?
Well, for one thing, we can listen to a 1960 recording of Gilbert and Sulli…
By Peter Filichia --
There I was, putting the final touches on my new book The Great Parade: The 1963-64 Broadway Season, which St. Martin's will bring out next spring. I wanted to check a r…
By Peter Filichia " Jule Styne couldn't do it. Frank Loesser couldn't do it. Even Richard Rodgers couldn't do it.
But Cole Porter could.
The task in question? Seeing your final Broadway mu…
By Peter Filichia " All of us remember the time when we got interested in theater and, for the first time, we read raves for a certain show that had just opened. "Oh," each of us recalls exc…
By Peter Filichia -- Sunday, February 9, 1964. Now more than fifty years have passed, but most everyone who was then alive and beyond the age of reason remembers it well.
Up until then, whe…
By Peter Filichia --
How many musicals that played only seven months on Broadway ever see two major Manhattan revivals and a snazzy concert version?
But as of this week, Little Me, which o…
By Peter Filichia --
Two hundred years ago this week, a star was born.
Edmund Kean was a journeyman actor until January 26, 1814. On that night, he played Shylock at the Drury Lane, London…
The most fascinating letter replicated in the recently published The Leonard Bernstein Letters isn't one solely by Leonard Bernstein.
The undated letter " suspected by editor Nigel Simeone …
In 1956, long before comic strip icons Superman, Charlie Brown and Annie became lead characters in Broadway musicals, there was Li'l Abner.
Al Capp's famed comic strip about the rustic inha…
Every now and then, I come across them.
I'm talking about the intense musical theater fans who tell me that they hate Hello, Dolly!
And yes, "hate" is the verb they gleefully use.
Last Jan…
How often does your phone ring anymore? We all seem to communicate differently now. Go away for a week's vacation, and you'll probably come back to fewer than a half-dozen messages on your a…
Here is the jackpot question in advance.
Musically speaking, what are you doing New Year's Eve at the party you're hosting?
A young friend excitedly told me that he planned to take many of…
Of all the musicals that have been nominated for Best Musical, only one has been Christmas-centric:
A Christmas Story: The Musical.
Yes, Tony-winners Annie and Rent as well as Tony-nominee…
When was the last time that you really listened to The Sound of Music?
Musical theater enthusiasts tend to avoid mega-hits. We played them so much when we first came to know them, after we'd…
Did you miss A Bed and a Chair: A New York Love Affair? It was the Stephen Sondheim-Wynton Marsalis revue that played City Center a few weeks ago.
That's all right. Not being able to make i…
Don't let December 1 go by without celebrating the 100th birthday of one of Broadway's favorite stars.
"Mary Martin" sounds as if it's a stage name, doesn't it? In fact, it's the actual na…
"Fifty years from now, they'll still be arguing about the grassy knoll, the Mafia, some Cuban crouched behind a stockade fence."
The lines come from a surreal scene in Assassins. Twenty-sev…
I was a little shocked while watching Charlotte Moore's splendid revival of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock at the Irish Repertory Theatre.
I wasn't surprised that J. Smith Cameron was …
At last! After years of waiting, one of the most endearing scores of recent vintage has finally been recorded and released.
It's going to be in a number of stockings that are hung by the ma…
Having a Halloween party? Many of my friends do, although they do demand that their guests come in costumes that were seen in Broadway musicals.
My favorite memory: I was dressed in Hugh O'…
Broadway already had Starbucks long before every street corner did. Starbuck Number One appeared as a pivotal character in N. Richard Nash's play The Rainmaker fifty-nine years ago next week…
