Santino Fontana, who took home the 2019 Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his role in Tootsie, will narrate the audiobook of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the Hunger Games prequel novel by Suzanne Collins. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes will be published simultaneously in print, digital, and audio editions on May 19 by Scholastic in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Scholastic has already announced a world English first printing of 2.5 million copies, and Stimola Literary Studio has sold translation rights to the title in 35 territories to date.
Fontana has an extensive list of theater and television credits, including such critically acclaimed small-screen programs as Fosse/Verdon, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Mozart in the Jungle. He’s also at home behind the mic, having narrated the audiobook recording of The Institute by Stephen King last year, which was recently honored with the 2020 Audie Award for Best Thriller/Suspense title.
In announcing the casting news on Wednesday, Lori Benton, president of Scholastic Audio, said, “Santino Fontana is an accomplished and talented stage and screen actor, as well as an award-winning audiobook narrator. Santino’s range and ability made him a perfect choice to handle a multiplicity of characters, and he brings depth and richness to Suzanne Collins’s extraordinary writing.”
Collins’s new book comes 10 years after the conclusion of her mega-selling Hunger Games trilogy, which boasts more than 100 million copies in print and digital formats worldwide, and which spawned a blockbuster feature-film franchise from Lionsgate. When Scholastic broke the news about the forthcoming The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes last June, the novel was described as a prequel set in the fictional country of Panem 64 years prior to the events of The Hunger Games. At that time, David Levithan, v-p, publisher, and editorial director for Scholastic offered some context for the project’s genesis. “As Suzanne Collins said when we announced the book, she wants ‘to explore the state of nature, who we are, and what we perceive is required for our survival,’ ” he told PW. “Panem provides extraordinarily rich material for such an exploration, and I as a reader think it’s a perpetually relevant exploration.”
