RE-INTRODUCING HELEN MORGAN BY PETER FILICHIA
Christopher S. Connelly knows how big a star Helen Morgan was during the Roaring ‘20s and beyond. But he’s now made sure that you know it, too. Connelly’s provided hundreds of eye-opening details in HELEN MORGAN: The Original Torch Singer and Ziegfeld’s Last Star. The biography proves that he’s a meticulous researcher and entertaining writer […]
THAT OTHER SOUTH PACIFIC By Peter Filichia
Frankly, I don’t think that I’d ever listened to it. But I did reach for that SOUTH PACIFIC recording as soon as I arrived home from the Goodspeed Opera House. (Not so incidentally, at the legendary Connecticut showplace, there’s an extraordinary production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic.) Are your eyebrows still as high as […]
STARTING HERE WITH MALTBY, SHIRE AND ROSENBLUM By Peter Filichia
“My first reaction was that all of the songs were losers.” “A terrible idea.” That first quotation, reported by Joshua Rosenblum in his excellent new book CLOSER THAN EVER, came from lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr. The second quip came from Maltby’s longtime writing partner, composer David Shire. Understand that Maltby wasn’t evaluating such Broadway abominations […]
LISTENING TO THE GREAT GATSBY By Peter Filichia
Although the title is printed in gold, on a black background, it also offers one tiny dollop of a different color. There’s a shining burst of green situated atop the first “T” of THE GREAT GATSBY. It’s on the just-released original cast album, too, of the new musical playing on Broadway – and at the […]
AS FOR FRANK LOESSER’S TRUE MASTERPIECE… By Peter Filichia
And then there was another loss that may have been the unkindest cut of all… As we discussed last week, although GUYS AND DOLLS was the biggest hit of the 1950-51 season, Frank Loesser’s music and lyrics lost the Best Score Tony to Irving Berlin’s CALL ME MADAM. Eleven years later, history re-embarrassed itself. HOW […]
