‘Dirty Dancing’ Remake Casts Sarah Hyland As Lisa Houseman
Modern Family’s Sarah Hyland has joined the cast of the Dirty Dancing remake, according to Deadline. Abigail Breslin was previously chosen for the part of Baby in the remake. Hyland will play the role of Lisa Houseman, Baby’s older sister. Jane Brucker played the role in the original 1987 film. The Dirty Dancing remake will be a three-hour production and will air on ABC. It is being produced by Lionsgate Television.
Sarah joins other announced Dirty Dancing cast members Colt Prattes, former Pussycat Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger, and Debra Messing. The Dirty Dancing plot centers around a relationship between the innocent and sheltered Baby (played by Breslin) and the charismatic dance instructor named Johnny (played by Colt Prattes). Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze played the roles in the original Dirty Dancing. Twenty-five-year-old Sarah Hyland’s character Lisa, the straight-laced and extroverted sister in the Houseman family, falls for a womanizing waiter who works at a resort in the Catskill Mountains where Johnny works, a resort where her affluent family spends a vacation. Messing will play Dirty Dancing’s Marjorie Houseman, the mother of Breslin and Hyland. The role of their father has not yet been cast, and a broadcast date has not been announced at this time.
Fans of the original Dirty Dancing will be eager to see if Sarah sings “Hula Hana” in her portrayal. Both the singing and dancing were admittedly less-than-stellar in the 1987 film, and it would be fun to see Hyland give it a shot. Watch Lisa perform the song in the original Dirty Dancing below.
Although Sarah is best known for her role as Haley Dunphy on ABC’s Modern Family, she brings a great deal of music and dance experience to her Dirty Dancing role. She has studied voice, ballet, jazz, hip-hop, tap, and theatre dance. She performed with her tap and theatre dance class at “Reel to Real” at Lincoln Center as invited performers, and she portrayed the title role in Annie at the age of 11 at the Papermill Playhouse in Milburn, New Jersey. Sarah also appeared as Jackie Bouvier in both on- and off-Broadway productions of Grey Gardens, which was nominated for a Best Musical Tony Award. When fans tune into ABC’s Dirty Dancing, they may be treated to a whole new and talented side of Sarah Hyland than we’ve seen on TV before.
Viewers who saw and loved the 1987 film Dirty Dancing will tune into the TV version with high expectations of Sarah Hyland and the rest of the cast. The original Dirty Dancing was a low-budget production from new studio Great American Films Limited Partnership that had only one known actor, Jerry Orbach, as the father of the Houseman family. It went on, however, to be a hit movie and has now made over $214 million worldwide. Add to that the recent success of a TV version of Grease and Hyland and castmates have to be feeling the pressure to bring us something big.
.@Sarah_Hyland lands a role in the upcoming #DirtyDancing TV movie: https://t.co/hCma2oXHWK pic.twitter.com/feZJNZRaSU
— InStyle (@InStyle) March 3, 2016
When Sarah isn’t working on Modern Family, these days you can often find her with 25-year-old British boyfriend Dominic Sherwood. The two met on the set of the 2014 film Vampire Academy.
Hyland often can not help but gush about her beau, telling E! Online, “He’s amazing. He’s an amazing person… We became such good friends on Vampire Academy. I’m so happy for him. It’s an amazing thing.”
Sarah Jane Hyland was born November 24, 1990, in New York City to parents Melissa D. Canady and Edward James Hyland. Besides her acting credits, Sarah worked as a producer in the 2015 production of See You in Valhalla, in which she also starred, and was an associate producer on the 2011 film The Man at the Counter. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her pet Maltipoo named Barkley.
[Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images]
