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By Peter Filichia — Julie Andrews played Maria von Trapp on stage two years before she started filming The Sound of Music. Well, at least in a manner of speaking. Andrews actually portrayed a parody version of the would-be nun who became a wife and multiple mother. She was Mama Pratt in the sequence “The […]

By Peter Filichia –- Liza Minnelli certainly started off 1974 with a bang. Not that 1973 was so bad. On March 27 of that year, Minnelli became the youngest performer to have won a Best Actress in a Musical Tony (for Flora the Red Menace in 1965) and then an Oscar for Leading Actress in […]

By Peter Filichia – So it was 50 years ago last week that Barbra Streisand made her first dynamic splash – when she opened on March 22, 1962 in I Can Get It for You Wholesale. In Jerome Weidman and Harold Rome’s look at the garment trade in the 1930s, Streisand’s Yetta Tessye Marmelstein was […]

By Peter Filichia — Broadway overtures certainly let you know early on what The Expected Hit Ballad will be. Usually, after a rousing fanfare that previews The Most Stirring Songs, everything calms down so that we can hear The Most Beautiful Song. It happens in the famed overture to Gypsy. “Small World,” which indeed turned […]

By Peter Filichia – When the members of the Oscar committee first met in 2008 to discuss possible Best Song nominations for the 2007 film year, many felt that “Falling Slowly” from Once should not be nominated. After all, hadn’t it been heard in coffee houses and appeared on two albums long before the film […]