Tina Fey Previews Her ‘Great News’ Exit and the ‘Mean Girls’ Musical
Let’s hope Harvey Weinstein is on a TV blackout at his fancy “rehab,” because tonight’s Great News could be triggering.
In the episode, which wraps up co-executive producer Tina Fey’s three-part arc as media mogul Diana St. Tropez, the author of “Boardroom Bitch” begins to harass the newsroom staff in a series of bizarre and clearly not-OK scenarios that seem to scream “inspired by Miramax’s disgraced bully.”
Of course, the unexpectedly timely storyline was shot months ago, so while Weinstein is spared (this time), Roger Ailes, Billy Bush and Bill O’Reilly all get served for their roles in previous harassment scandals.
Fey did hint, however, that the situation may not actually spell the end of St. Tropez. “I’ll shoot my stuff and then I’ll go back to New York, put my kids in school, and then if they need me, I’ll try to come back,” she told TV Insider whiling filming in L.A. this summer.”We’ll see.”
Not that she’ll have a lot of free time. The Emmy winner and husband Jeff Richmond’s Broadway-bound musical adaptation of Mean Girls is wrapping up rehearsals in New York and heading to DC for out-of-town previews.
“It was thrilling,” the admitted Smash fan says of working in the theatrical world. “It’s such a collaborative process because Jeff is writing the music; a very smart woman named Nell Benjamin is writing the lyrics and as the book writer; I’m creating pieces of connective tissue and also helping to shape the story. You spend a lot of time figuring out what is the right idea for a song, where it goes, who is singing it and why and to whom…that is a bulk of the book writer’s work.” Making it all the more fun? “We had a lot of Smash-like moments in the rehearsal room!”
Given that the 2004 feature film starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel MacAdams is so beloved, Fey has wisely stuck close to the source material. “I hate to say that it’s not wildly different from the movie…people are singing, that’s new,” she laughs, adding that there will be some “light touches” to update the tale “just to let audiences know we’re in the present.”
And based on this week’s totally fetch final run-throughs, we can confirm Fey’s feeling that “there’s really a lot of good numbers” is, in fact, truer than anything that was written in Regina George’s Burn Book (fans will devour the lunch-room spectacle of “Where Do You Belong?” and the first-act closer “Justice”). Just don’t expect more of cult fave, Candy Cane-getter Glenn Coco. “I think he’s fully realized in the film,” she jokes. “He is still there though, I can say that.”
You go, Glenn Coco.
Great News, Thursdays, 9:30/8:30c, NBC
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