Saturday Night Live brought us a great episode with host Selena Gomez and one that poked fun at a great many things, including some recent Broadway controversy. In multiple ways. The Great White Way was hit pretty hard when COVID came, mainly because you couldn’t safely put on theater in the midst of the pandemic. Slowly, theater has been making a comeback and with it has been a surge of new projects and by extent COVID cases within the casts.
There are precautions in place, but what happens when everyone has to tap out of a performance of a show? Well, in this Saturday Night Live sketch titled “Irish Play”, we see as a bunch of understudies take on a play they are absolutely not prepared for. The sketch also touched on the recent controversy that the play Take Me Out has had in the news. Star Jesse Williams is nude in the production, which led to the show locking up cell phones to try and keep from it leaking to the internet. That didn’t stop it from happening though.
So when a couple (played by Mikey Day and Melissa Villaseñor) go to see a new play called “A Storm Within”, they’re confronted by a front of show speech that includes the note to not take pictures of the penis that they’re going to see on stage and to also not be shocked if no one knows their lines seeing as the entire cast is understudies, including the penis and the dogs.
It’s both funny and sad because…there’s been a lot of this on Broadway recently. Just this weekend, the Broadway show Moulin Rouge had to cancel their shows because of COVID cases. During the previews for the Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga take on Macbeth, director Sam Gold played a part with script in hand because too many people were out sick.
It’s a weird time to be a fan of theater or be on Broadway, but this sketch made it a little funny given just how wild it’s been recently. Clearly no one listened to the speech at the start of the show because when the “penis” is ready much too early into Act 1, the actor (played by Bowen Yang) comes out onto stage, says his line, and starts to take his clothes off, with everyone in the audience taking a picture of him.
Broadway is sort of back and this sketch is honestly pretty funny given just how messy it’s been recently. Check it out here:
Read Next
About The Author
