‘Law & Order: SVU’ looks to hire stage actors
As professional theaters remain shut down, New York stage actors can at least look to “Law & Order: SVU” for employment. Playwright Warren Leight (“Side Man”), who is also the showrunner of “Law & Order: SVU,” told Deadline.com that he wants to give “as many jobs to as many theater actors as we can…A lot of [Hollywood actors] aren’t going to be willing to get on a plane and quarantine right now. We realized early on that we’ll have to cast locally much more.” Stage actors who have made or will make appearances on “Law & Order: SVU” include Eva Noblezada (“Hadestown”), Alex Brightman (“Beetlejuice”) and Jelani Alladin (“Frozen”).
Fauci links fall theater reopening to vaccination
Dr. Anthony Fauci (who has offered thoughts on how and when live theater can return throughout the pandemic) advised that a new target date is “sometime in the fall of 2021” during an interview with the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, as first reported by the New York Times. He added that his prediction is predicated on the vast majority of the population getting vaccinated, theaters having effective ventilation systems and audience members continuing to wear masks at first. “We’ll be back in the theaters. Performers will be performing. Audiences will be enjoying it…It will happen,” Fauci said.
‘Mean Girls’ will not return to Broadway
The musical “Mean Girls” (which had been running on Broadway for approximately two years at the time that the shutdown began and had already recouped its capitalization costs) will not return to Broadway and has officially closed, its producers have confirmed. In a statement, producer Lorne Michaels referred to plans to relaunch the U.S. national tour, bring the show to London and move forward with developing a film adaptation of the musical. Months ago, Disney announced that “Frozen” (which also opened on Broadway in Spring 2018) would not return to Broadway.
MTC will bring ‘Skeleton Crew’ to Broadway
Ruben Santiago-Hudson has got a lot of work to do next season at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, which is run by the nonprofit Manhattan Theatre Club. As previously announced, Santiago-Hudson will bring his autobiographical one-man show “Lackawanna Blues” to the venue in the fall. Now word comes that Santiago-Hudson will direct Dominique Morisseau’s (“Ain’t Too Proud,” “Pipeline”) drama “Skeleton Crew” (about the workers of an auto plant in Detroit at the beginning of the Great Recession) at the venue in Winter 2022. Santiago-Hudson directed “Skeleton Crew” Off-Broadway in 2016 for the Atlantic Theater Company.
‘Ratatouille’ fundraising haul reaches $2 million
“Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical” is now officially the most successful, and unlikely, fundraising event in the history of The Actors Fund. Following last week’s news that “Ratatouille” raised over $1 million during its initial 72-hour online run beginning on New Year’s Day, a surprise encore performance on TikTok was added for Jan. 10, which attracted 150,000 viewers and brought the overall fundraising total to $2 million.
This week’s streaming recommendations…
“Under the Radar” (the Public Theater’s annual festival of new experimental and international work is being presented online this year for free), through Sun, publictheater.org…“Gloria” (original cast reading of dark comedy by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins about the aftereffects of an incident of workplace violence), Jan. 19-24, vineyardtheatre.org.
