STEPHEN SONDHEIM: AN APPRECIATION By Peter Filichia
What a metaphor, huh? Take a look at the history of the Tony Awards for Best Original Score. There have been fourteen years when the category wasn’t even offered, and fifty-eight when it was. Do the math, and you’ll see that makes for seventy-two of the Tonys’ seventy-three seasons. So what happened the other season? […]
The Most Beautiful Girls in the World By Peter Filichia
“Who?” That’s the response I got last year when I made a passing reference to Elizabeth Taylor. There was a time when this could have never happened. Taylor, the recipient of three Oscars, was a world-famous movie star and the first one to get a $1 million salary for a film (CLEOPATRA). But the question-asker […]
DOUGLAS WATT SAVED HIS RAVES — AND PANS By Peter Filichia
They’re scrapbooks, but they’re not full of scraps. On the contrary, the many volumes that Patricia Watt shared with me are full of letters that her father treasured and kept. He was Douglas Watt, the first-string theater critic for New York Daily News from 1971 through 1986 (although he did occasional pieces there through 1992). […]
MISTAKES WERE MADE By Peter Filichia
If you’re traveling through the Southwest and saunter into a Navajo gift shop, you may decide to buy a handsome rug only moments before you decide not to. After careful examination, you may notice a tiny flaw in it. Check another rug and you’ll discover a defect in that one, too – and the next […]
SONDHEIM’S WORST ENEMY By Peter Filichia
He’s done it again. Stephen Sondheim has a way of minimizing his achievements. It’s not false modesty. It isn’t even modesty. It’s hyper-criticism of his own work. Even those who have only come to know musicals in the past few months probably know that that Sondheim has been highly critical of his work on WEST […]
