Returning to the Silk Stockings District
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 musical become a hit both with the critics and the public. While Styne’s The Red Shoes, Loesser’s Pleasures and Palaces and Rodgers’ I […]
Yes, Virginia, There Is an Albee Play on CD
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 exclaiming, “I’ve GOT to see that!” For me, it was Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in […]
Remembering a Most Famous Date in Music
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, when people spoke of “The British Invasion,” they’d meant that fourteen-mile ride that Paul Revere made on horseback from his home […]
There Is Always Little Me
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 originally played 257 performances, can boast of its fourth major showcase in New York. On Wednesday and going through the weekend, it […]
Happy Anniversary, Edmund Kean!
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’s most famous theater. His portrayal of Shakespeare’s sometimes-victimized and sometimes-vicious Jew in The Merchant of Venice made him the 19th […]
