Anika Larsen, the Tony-nominated actor who already co-presents the Broadway Green Alliance's climate talk, has become co-chair of the organization's board of directors, with effect from October 1.
Larsen succeeds Charlie Deull, executive vice president of Clark Transfer and one of the board's founding co-chairs, and sits alongside Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, vice president for cultural affairs at Arizona State University and executive director of ASU Gammage. Deull remains on the board as a director.
The alliance is the theater industry's own effort to get productions, venues and audiences to adopt greener practices. It began in 2008 as an ad hoc committee of the Broadway League, has been a fiscally sponsored program of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS since 2013, and is run day to day by its executive director, Molly Braverman.
The new co-chair is already part of the alliance's public-facing work. Larsen and Braverman present No Day But Today: A Climate Talk That's Also Kind of a Broadway Musical, which takes its format from the presentation behind Al Gore's Climate Reality Project and threads songs, theater references and performance clips through a slide show on the causes and effects of the climate crisis and the solutions to it. The slide show runs about 30 minutes and is followed by a Q&A, for roughly an hour in all; the alliance offers it free of charge to eligible organizations and recommends it for ages 12 and up.
On stage, Larsen was nominated for the 2014 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for playing the lyricist Cynthia Weil in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.
