The first one I want to see is Nighttime Traffic, which has book, music, and lyrics by Alex Wyse. 

I should have seen it 19 months ago when Wyse was doing this show as his senior thesis at Boston University. After he invited me, I said I’d take the drive and catch his closing performance. But fate – meaning snow – took a two-foot-blizzardly hand and kept me from making the trip.

At that point the name Alex Wyse meant only an occasional e-mail. But last winter I ran into it again when he played Jay in Lost in Yonkers at the Paper Mill Playhouse. As I wrote in The Star-Ledger, “The real discovery is Alex Wyse. He sports eyes that are already saddened by life, and has the perfect drone of a Bronx accent. He has a nice sense of wonder as he discovers how life works, and a beautiful sense of introspection. This young actor may well have a stunning future ahead of him.”

Soon New York will see if he has an equally stunning future as a writer of musicals.

Wyse tells me that Nighttime Traffic is a three-character original musical set in an unnamed city. Although Calder and Max are still in their early twenties, they’ve been lovers for nearly four years -- which means that they’ve been together a substantial part of their lives.

At the moment Calder is student-teaching in an elementary school and is enjoying it immensely. Max, on the other hand, is a writer who’s frustrated to the max. He did have a book of short stories published, but it didn’t do well. (It’s a rare book of short stories that does.)

Max is so discouraged that he’s stopped writing, and instead spends his time clubbing. One night he urges a reluctant Calder to go with him.

Both wish he hadn’t after Calder has a medical emergency that sends him to the hospital. Says Wyse, “Calder has had some big health issues in the past, but both he and Max have been in some denial about it.”

At the hospital, the men meet Audrey, a nurse who offers them a most magical pill that slows down one’s perception of time. While the person who takes it remains in normal time, he sees everything around him in much slower time. “One minute equals one hour,” says Wyse. “That’s why Max takes it – to have more time with Calder. This also allowed me to write a song in which Max is singing very quickly and Calder is singing very, very slowly.”

It’s a musical that deals with grief, and Wyse admits that he was partly inspired by the illness and death of his beloved grandmother Lois Wyse. She was the oh-so-successful advertising executive (“With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good”) who became an author of more than 60 books, many of them mega-sellers. She was also married to Lee Guber during the time that he co-produced Rags on Broadway.

The affection that Lois Wyse had for her eight grandchildren is easy to surmise. Many of the her books deal with her substantial feelings on the matter. Among her most-quoted statements are “If I had known how wonderful it would be to have grandchildren, I'd have had them first” and “A mother becomes a true grandmother the day she stops noticing the terrible things her children do -- because she is so enchanted with the wonderful things her grandchildren do.”

Alex Wyse has done some wonderful things of which both his grandmother and parents approved. During his high school years in his native Ohio, he found that all three were quite the cheerleaders when he played Pippin, Jesus in Godspell, the Emcee in Cabaret and Charley in Merrily. They all supported his attending B.U., where he decided to switch his energies to writing.

“But when my grandmother was dying of cancer three years ago,” Wyse says, “I had to find a way to deal with my grief. There were times when I wouldn’t face it and, strangely enough, other times when I was actually too eager to deal with it. So I decided to create a character that had these reactions, too.”

Last year, Wyse submitted Nighttime Traffic to NYMF, and while he made it to the final 30, he was eliminated in the next round. He assumed that would be the last he heard from the festival, but it wasn’t. “I got a call from Michael Lluberes,” Wyse says. “He was on the selection committee and liked the show quite a bit, but he couldn’t convince all the other judges to see it his way. He told me he was a director and wanted to get involved with the project.” Indeed Lluberes has, and this new presentation will be staged by him.

The production I missed at Boston University was not only totally written by Wyse, but was also produced by him – and starred him as Max. This time, however, Wyse isn’t playing in Traffic. “I almost went completely insane doing all those jobs,” he says.

Throughout last season, Wyse not only did a little tinkering with the show, but also spent much of his time in South Korea acting in a musical called Academy. “I played an unsuspecting dorky little freshman who has to deal with upper-classmen,” he says.

Although Wyse played the victim of the piece, he was an equal partner in the adoration Korea showed the actors. “If you’re on stage in a musical in Korea,” Wyse says, “you’re treated as if you’re the biggest celebrity in the world. After every performance when we came out the stage door, there had to be 300 girls waiting for us and screaming their heads off. They even chased us down the street. And when we did a song at the Korean versions of the Tonys, they went crazier still. We went pretty crazy, too,” he admits, "when we won Best Musical.”

So while Wyse is hoping for a success at NYMF, he wouldn’t mind returning to Korea with Nighttime Traffic, too. You can see it first on Tuesday, Sept. 28th at 8:00 pm; Wednesday, Sept. 29th at 4:30 pm; Wednesday, Sept. 29th at 8:00 pm; Saturday, Oct. 2nd at 8:00 pm; Sunday, Oct. 3rd at 1:00 pm; Tuesday, Oct. 5th at 4:30 pm; and Sunday, Oct. 10th at 1:00 pm at Urban Stages at 259 West 30th Street. Visit www.nymf.org

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com. Check out his weekly column each Tuesday at www.masterworksbroadway.com.

As for Cavalcade’s star Doreen Walsh, she didn’t have as much singing and dancing talent as she thought. Certainly the town’s most prominent critic was happy to tell her that, after he noted that “Last night on 14th Street” -- (where Broadway shows then took place then; that’s why Dolly sings about “the lights of 14th Street”) – “a show opened that may be the most witless, tuneless, worthless piece of foolishness spilled onto the New York stage this season …. As for Doreen Walsh, she has the voice of one of the lesser angels, which is a small blessing, but many of the lesser angels chose to sing in Hades, which is where you’ll think you’ve been after a visit to the old Variety Theater.” Wow! With those lines, Martin shows that he could be a critic – although he has much too much talent to settle for that job.

Director of the Month: Alex Mallory, who did beautiful work with Ravel, a play that had nothing to do with the composer. This was Ravel as in yarn -- for Samantha Collier unspooled a mesmerizing story that took in everything from the Greek fates to the study of frogs as well as a family's dealing with an unexpected death. What a mood Mallory created! Look for her work in the future.

Ran into producer Ed Gaynes, who’s currently got My Big Gay Italian Wedding at St. Luke’s Theatre. He informed me that at the end of one performance a couple came up to say that while they enjoyed the show immensely, they didn’t understand why Abraham Lincoln never showed up. Not many moments had to pass before Gaynes realized they really were supposed to be at Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party at the Acorn. Seemed that the couple arrived a little late and the usher just instinctively tore their tickets and told them to sit anywhere. By the way, I caught the Abe Lincoln show and had a hard time getting behind a gay teacher who makes her grammar school students put on a play that claims Lincoln was homosexual. Too self-serving, don’t you think?

Joe Miller wrote about my mentioning that Dolores Gray won a Tony as Best Actress in a Musical for Carnival in Flanders, even though the show ran less than a week. He mad a fascinating point when relating “Did Gray really make such a great impact in a show that ran six performances? I'm afraid she won by default. The season that year ran from March 1, 1953 to February 28, 1954. To qualify for ‘Actress,’ as opposed to ‘Featured Actress,’ you had to be billed above the title. So who was Gray's competition? NOBODY – for no other actress was billed above the title in that lean season in which the only other book musicals were Can-Can, Me and Juliet and Kismet. Alfred Drake, who won Best Actor for Kismet, might very well have won under any circumstances, but his only competition was John Raitt in Carnival in Flanders” Well, you know what they say in Top Banana: “Joe Miller doesn’t make jokes.”

The column in which I mentioned blasting the Sound of Music soundtrack to combat a boom-boxer who was playing horrifying music spurred many responses. Both Ted Zoldan and Christopher S. Connelly thought that I would have got rid of the guy faster had I played Wagner. Robert Diamant suggested that Gutenberg: The Musical would have done the trick. Josh Ellis was the most specific. “I would have played one track from Dietrich in London – a song called ‘Go Away From My Window.’"

Both John Griffin and Rick Thompson thought playing The Sound of Music could be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Griffin wrote, “I would have been scared off before ’16 Going on 17,’ which may be the most horrifying song I've ever heard. It’s Number One on my all-time worst list. If I were you, I might have tried playing ‘I Had a Ball’ – and I might have even sung along with it. Now, that would have been U-G-L-Y.” Thompson said, “The ickiest song in that score -- maybe in Broadway history or even the entire history of music -- is ‘So Long, Farewell.’ I'd be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling than to listen to that wretched song again.”

But a couple of readers said that they did much the same thing when boom-boxers stayed too long at their windows. Kevin Daly’s torture of choice was “A New Argentina.” Jon Maas reported, “When my landlord's son used to constantly play basketball in the backyard, the plunka plunka plunka of his dribbling was loud and impossible to ignore. I couldn't say ‘Don't play,’ but I could open the windows, face the speakers towards them, play Gypsy and let Merman hit him FULL BLAST. Needless to say, the first time I tried this, the poor guy did not make it past ‘Some People.’ However, with repeated hearings, he stopped running in the house. Maybe there was hope for him yet! So the next time he was making his plunka plunka plunka noises, I turned on Mame. The poor slob didn’t make it past ‘St. Bridget’ and he has never played basketball in the yard again.”

Meanwhile, Howard Marren recalled that long hot summer when all his neighbors’ windows were open, but the moment after he put the needle on the “I had a dream” notes of the Gypsy overture, every householder within earshot slammed his window shut.

Speaking of Gypsy, here's our Brainteaser of the Month: Whose program bio from long ago went like this? “(NAME), who plays Dainty June, doubled in this role as understudy while she played Agnes in the national company for eight months last year. Her experience in these roles was unique in that she was called upon to portray both parts one evening due to an accident backstage.”

By the way, Jack Lechner was the first to answer last month’s brainteaser -- What do these songs have in common? “The Ballad of Booth” (Assassins), “Broadway Baby” (Follies), “Captain Henry St. James” (Oh, Captain!), “Dear Mr. Gershwin” (Radio Gals), “The Golden Ram” (Two by Two), “Grand Imperial Cirque de Paris” (Carnival), “How Do You Spell ‘Ambassador’?” (High Society) and “On the Steps of the Palace” (Into the Woods). Only minutes after I posed the question Lechner was ready with the correct answer: All of those songs include the names of current Broadway theaters.

Finally, August 2 marked the 18th anniversary of the last bow taken by Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss and Gene Hackman after they'd finished their final performance of Death and the Maiden. But according to Susan L. Schulman, the show’s press agent, it was also the last time the three mooned the audience.

Seems that the front curtain of that 1992 drama was actually a one-way mirror where the actors could see the audience but the audience couldn’t see them. “And every single night,” says Schulman, “the three stars would moon the audience. When director Mike Nichols was around, he’d often do it with them.” Now we know!

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com. Check out his weekly column each Tuesday at www.masterworksbroadway.com

Richie Richman declared “I was listening to Dr. Ronald Hoffman’s radio show, where he was talking about the heart and heard him mention that The Cowardly Lion wanted one. We all know that it was actually courage the Lion wanted, but I didn’t listen long enough to learn if anyone corrected the good doctor.” Skip Koenig reported that while he watched the TV show “House,” he not only heard “You're invisible like the Wizard of Oz” but also later caught “Here's Oz!” – not to mention a subsequent episode that had a character saying he’d prefer to be at a performance of The Wiz. Koenig also saw that an auction had resulted in a bidder's purchasing four Wizard of Oz cards with signatures by Garland, Haley, Bolger and Burke -- for $2509.50. Meanwhile, John Atkins promised “I’ll start keeping track myself, starting with July 15, 10:40 am: I read Peter Filichia’s Friday column, in which he discusses the frequency of Oz references in our culture.”

As for Howard Gradet who started all this, he had yet another story to tell. “My best friend was at the Beijing airport, where he asked a staff person directions to security. She pointed to the yellow arrows on the floor and said ‘Follow the yellow brick road.’"

But Ed Glazier really went to (jolly old) town on this topic: “For years I’ve kept a folder filled with direct quotations, citations, allusions, comic strips, political cartoons, advertising, greeting cards and obvious direct Oz-tied merchandise. Here are some of my observations after years of collecting:

“Although the original Baum books were very popular in their day, almost all references that appear now can be traced directly to the MGM movie, not to any of the Baum books.

“While Wicked is now practically an industry unto itself, it was surely the MGM movie that most influenced the writing of the book. People do not generally go to see Wicked the first time because they've read Gregory Maguire's book, but because they know the characters from the MGM movie.

“Because of the incredible familiarity with the movie, almost every reference can be expected to be understood without the need for any background explanation. Thus, even minimal direct references can be assumed to be Ozian. You cited ‘The Best Lookouts for Lions, Trogons and Bears’ and guessed it was Ozian. I say that there is no ambiguity here. However, if you add the words ‘Oh, my’ to the end of a similar tri-partite list, MGM's Oz is instantly and unambiguously invoked, almost regardless of what items are in the list; the rhythm and meter are important, but even they are not essential. In my folder I have an article about headline errors and goofs entitled ‘Lions and Tiggers and Errors, Oh, My!’ An article about the forthcoming TV season: ‘Ratings and shares and sweeps, Oh, My!’ An article about new books in the fantasy area: ‘Pythons, Goblins and Penguins, Oh, My!' An article about giving away plastic cockroaches at a meeting of some legislators: ‘Lawmakers, lobbyists, and bugs, Oh, My!’

“The most common kinds of references include:

1. Being in or from Kansas or NOT being in Kansas (if you prefix with “Toto”, it can be anyplace -- e.g., ‘Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in San Francisco anymore.’

2. References include dropping a house on someone or something, deliberately or otherwise.

3. References to a person (not always) melting, often but not always, involving water.

4. Combinations of a strawman, a tinman, and a lion, with or without a Dorothy equivalent. In some cases just one of the figures is enough.

5. Reference to presence, absence, or acquisition of one or more of the following: a brain, a heart, courage.

6. Winged/flying monkeys

7. Most rainbow references don’t have to do with leprechauns and/or pots of gold.

8. Auntie ‘Em

9. Going home/No place like home. Yes, other sources for this include the song ‘Home, Sweet, Home,’ but an Oz context can often be identified.

10. Munchkins. Says Wikipedia, ‘As a result of the popularity of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the word "munchkin" has entered the English language as a reference to small children, dwarfs, or anything cute of diminutive stature.’

11. References to ruby slippers. (They are silver in Baum’s books.)

12. Transport by clicking one’s heels together – to home or elsewhere.

“There are many many more. I’ve probably even omitted some of the obvious ones. I have kept folders for Wonderland and Neverland, too, and while references to them can also be found often, they are not as incredibly ingrained in our life and culture as the MGM Oz is.”

And me? References have abounded, especially when I went to Highland, Illinois to an elementary school auditorium to catch a community theater production of The Wizard of Oz, courtesy of the Hard Road Theatre.

Should I add to the agony of the person who prepared the playbill by pointing out that (s)he referred to our heroine as Dorothy Hale? And while I’m complaining, let’s never again have an amateur orchestra play an overture. Don’t give kids a four-minute showcase where we hear how young ‘uns haven’t yet mastered instruments. It gets things off to a terrible start.

Director Josh Noll put a Dolly-like passerelle around the orchestra to function as his Yellow Brick Road. He also put Dorothy in that blue-and-white gingham checkered dress that we’ve all known and loved (and some of us have worn, or would still like to). But he also ensured that in the opening scenes she’d wear a gray-and-white dress instead. Nice.

When I saw that a Real Live Girl was playing Toto, I feared for Miss Gulch’s bicycle basket. But the harridan just walked the “dog” off while holding her on a leash. Our Toto walked not on all fours, but merely on both twos.

The production also showed me that we’re also going to have to change that famous cliché “There are no small parts, just small actors.” These days in community theater, there are no small parts -- just actors who don’t get microphones while the principals do.

The best part, of course, was watching elementary school children play Munchkins. Oh, one member of the Lollipop Guild pulled focus terribly by spinning around, extending his arms and swinging his all-day sucker as if he had a cat by the tail. But, oh, that little boy in the red pants, red sequined tie and black hat! How wonderful to see a lad who really cared, who knew every one of choreographer Ariel Frey’s complicated gestures and sharply enacted every one of them. That he was surrounded by well-meaning kids who just didn’t have that extra something only underlined his terrific talent. Kid, whoever you are, I look forward to seeing you on Broadway if I live long enough.

But give every principal credit. Absolutely no one ever at any time ever aped a line as it was done in the iconic 1939 film. Each performer put his spin on each character. You’d almost think that no one on stage had ever before run into The Wizard of Oz. But as we all know, that’s not possible for even a 48-hour span.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com. Check out his weekly column each Tuesday at www.masterworksbroadway.com.