Weekend Agenda: IDGAF About Miss Hannigan Edition

The week is done. The 2011-2012 theater season is growing short. And 5,000 shows are opening in the next twelve days. On your mark, get set…

• Jesus Christ Superstar‘s Josh Young almost didn’t make it to the church… I mean theater… on time this week thanks to a crappily-timed illness that sidelined him for the show’s final previews. He was well enough on Thursday night to open the show –- and shore up his chances of a Tony nomination. No word on how he was feeling after he realized that half of the critics reviewed his understudy.
• Smash will return for a second season — without creator Theresa Rebeck at the helm. She may stick around to write some episodes, and will continue to executive produce, but she won’t be overseeing the show day-to-day. Bottom line: We don’t care what they do as long Will Chase stays, and continues to remove his shirt at least once an episode.
• Sting’s musical The Last Ship, which he’s working on with Pulitzer Prize winner Brian Yorkey, and which actually sounds interesting — check the description behind the link — has been postponed. Not a lot of word on why, but we’re not-so-secretly hoping it comes back to life and brings Colin Donnell and Michael Esper with it.
• Speaking of new musicals… This sounds awful amazing ridiculous curious like it might be kind of good: Sheryl Crow is writing songs for a musical version of the 1982 movie Diner, which will debut at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco in the fall before making a go at Broadway. Worth a trip across the country? Probably not. Worth coercing someone to give us a bootleg? Probably.
• Aaaaand we’re back to talking about Les Miz: the Movie Musical. This time because the first images of Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean have just leaked. BRB. Gotta go file these under: Hugh Jackman Looks Unsurprisingly Perfect.
• Gavin Creel’s badass new album, Get Out, dropped this week, and immediately made the iTunes bestseller list. The launch party at Joe’s Pub involved a newly-shorn Steel Burkhardt, dancing, and Ben Cullum — all things we love.
• Looks like the grand and continuing experiment known as Carrie has come to another untimely end. MCC’s planned extension of the show was abruptly canceled this week. Apparently audiences in the 80s weren’t completely full of shit. Except for the whole Phantom thing.
• The hilarious, disgustingly talented, handsome Vince Gatton, as it turns out, is also a genius/trivia nerd. Mr. Gatton was on Jeopardy this week, which we think is the COOLEST THING EVER. We won’t spoil the episode for you, but you can read a bit about his experience — in his own words — right here.
• Since Johnny Gallagher decided to go and get all Hollywood famous and be on a big Aaron Sorkin TV show, we’ve missed having his pretty face in NYC all the time. So it was damn exciting to see pics from the American Idiot tour opening in LA this week. His smile — and nerdy glasses, and messy hair — were just the hit we needed to get us over our withdrawal.
• SHUT UP THIS IS ABOUT THEATER. We hate ourselves for loving it, but R. Kelly’s musical (?) of extreme fabulousity and ludicrousity, Trapped In the Closet, will continue. New episodes will air on IFC. As Sylvester would say, OH SHIT.
• A few months back, the esteemed posters on All That Chat attempted to compare Jeremy Jordan to John Raitt. It didn’t go well. This week, they tried to compare him to Gene Kelly. In the coming weeks, they’ll try George Clooney, Jon Hamm, Errol Flynn, and Paul Newman, to see if any of those work any better.