Variety Broadway Breakfast: Sorkin, Zegler, Dolly Musical Highlights — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Tom Felton hosted Variety's Business of Broadway Breakfast at the Mandarin Oriental while reprising Draco Malfoy in 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,' joking about starting 'a club' for Toms making Broadway debuts (Tom Blyth), with Tom Holland already enrolled and Tom Hiddleston a target recruit.
- Aaron Sorkin and Bradley Whitford reunited for the first revival of Sorkin's 1989 courtroom drama 'A Few Good Men,' with Whitford calling it unusually timely and explicitly invoking Trump's 'shut up, piggy' remark to a reporter about his name in the Epstein files.
- Rachel Zegler recounted auditioning for the 'Evita' revival while performing as Juliet in 'Romeo + Juliet,' FaceTime-audio-calling her agent from a basement beneath 'Wicked,' singing about 40 pages of material, and then doing a two-show day.
- The 'Evita' cast — Zegler, Diego Rodriguez, and James Olivas — highlighted that all three leads are Latino, with Olivas noting Latinos are '20% of population and represent just 3% of stories' in Hollywood.
- The 'Evita' company responded to Trump's claim that the show is his favorite by retooling its themes, with Zegler noting 'the musical about the celebrity who became a politician?' and Olivas cracking that Trump 'can see himself in a blonde wig.'
- Dolly Parton was deeply involved in 'Dolly: A True Original Musical' before her August death at 80, telling starstruck performers 'I'm just a normal girl' and summing up the show's theme to director Bartlett Sher as 'I'm a jezebel — and God loves me anyway!'
- Haley Swindal, lead producer of the upcoming 'Damn Yankees' revival (with Neil Patrick Harris and Julianne Hough) and granddaughter of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, is partnering with Major League Baseball to market the show to sports fans.
Why it matters: Whitford's explicit invocation of Trump's 'shut up, piggy' Epstein-files moment signals the 'A Few Good Men' revival is being positioned as a pointed political commentary rather than nostalgia theater, while the all-Latino 'Evita' cast marks a concrete representation step — Olivas cites Latinos as 20% of the US population but just 3% of Hollywood stories.
Ask SkimNews
