WASATCH THEATRE COMPANY: MELANCHOLY PLAY For the Wasatch Theatre Company production, Director Morag Shepherd took to heart Sarah Ruhl’s instructions for Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce: “Melancholy in this play is Bold, Outward, Sassy, Sexy and Unashamed. It is not introverted. It uses, instead, the language of Jacobean direct address.” In a very smart, gratifying … Read more
Nearly 50 years ago, the compilation Side by Side by Sondheim premiered to strong reviews and audience response, so persistent that by the late 1980s, Sondheim was urged to do an update or a sequel. Relenting to the request, he collaborated with Julia McKenzie, who was one of the creators and stars of the earlier … Read more
MATCHSTICK GIRL BY JENNIFER KOKAI AND KENNETH PLAIN: WEBER STATE THEATRE There have been many adaptations of Hans Christian Andersen’s 19th century short folktale The Little Match Girl. Some have been faithful to the story of a young beggar who sells matchsticks on the streets of Copenhagen but on a bitterly cold New Year’s Eve … Read more
SALT LAKE ACTING COMPANY: HAIRY AND SHERRI Watching Hairy and Sherri, Adrienne Dawes’ new play which is receiving outstanding acting performances in a premiere production by the Salt Lake Acting Company (SLAC), requires the audience member to focus on the characters’ nuanced body language and nonverbal actions. Those subtleties propel the significant epiphanies of Dawes’ … Read more
Will, a sales manager, is supposed to be on his way to celebrate his wife’s birthday but he has a fatal accident because of distracted driving. James, a demolition worker who has a challenging relationship with his daughter, is crushed by falling pieces of a collapsed building. Their paths cross in the hereafter when they … Read more
In a scene in the middle of Mountain Meadows, a new play by Debora Threedy, Nita tells a Mormon elder, “We can’t put Mountain Meadows behind us if we won’t even admit it happened.” He replies that no one has denied its occurrence and that not talking about it might be the “best thing for … Read more
In the middle of the superb world premiere production at the Pioneer Theatre Company (PTC) of Kareem Fahmy’s A Distinct Society, Peyman, an Iranian cardiac surgeon, tells Manon, who runs the tiny Haskell Free Library straddling the Canadian-U.S. border, “When I was young my father told me: ‘Peyman, politics is shit. Ignore politics, and it … Read more
For the first time in three years, Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT) is holding Regalia, its largest annual fundraiser, in person. As usual, the stakes are significant. Four choreographers are assigned a group of dancers to create a short work (usually five but less than 10 minutes in length) in just four hours. The kicker is … Read more
This year’s selection in The Utah Review of the top ten moments of the Utah Enlightenment in 2022 was easily the quickest to lock in, considering the possibilities. There were no close calls. The ten selections were a slam dunk. This year, however, presented the opportunity for a twist. While nine of the ten selections … Read more
The 1983 movie A Christmas Story was a definitive sleeper hit. Directed by Bob Clark, the film did reasonably well at the box office, easily recouping its comparatively low production costs ($3.3 million) after opening right before Thanksgiving and it was still in about a hundred theaters on New Year’s Day in 1984. Clark was … Read more