Preview

Historic collaboration Double Take virtual concert, with 2 world premieres, set to open Repertory Dance Theatre’s 55th season, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s 57th season

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Modern dance always has adapted to extraordinary circumstances. “We always have been willing to improvise, adjust and be flexible,” Linda C. Smith, co-founder and executive artistic director of Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT), explains. “If we couldn’t afford a theater, we found a rooftop. If we didn’t have a budget for costumes, we performed in pedestrian … Read more

Salt Lake Acting Company announces its 49 ¾ season, including streaming, in-person productions, digital film series, world premieres

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Major anniversaries always call for big celebrations. For an independent performing arts company, a golden anniversary not only demands an extravaganza but it also is a moment to highlight the triumph of resilience in demonstrating to the community that local cultural enterprises are indispensable for elevating the social conscience and inspiring others to join creative … Read more

I Wanna Hold Your Hand: 9th annual Rose Exposed goes virtual with six companies hitting the nail on the head in these pandemic times

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There always is something soothing in the familiar pop strains of such Beatles classics as I Want to Hold Your Hand, the 1963 hit that truly brought the British quartet to its fame with American audiences. Unfortunately, when one washes and sanitizes their hands, the immediate impulse to touch, however, is constrained by social distancing … Read more

Utah Film Center Damn These Heels 2020: 17th annual queer film festival may be virtual but slate packed with 23 international films, 4 shorts programs, special events including drive-in experience

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Utah Review is providing daily coverage of the Utah Film Center’s 17th annual Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival. Follow daily for feature reviews of the 2020 slate during the festival. One of Utah Film Center’s signature centerpieces is moving to a virtual platform this year with its well-established brand of exceptional … Read more

Fight for public lands: Public Trust documentary to be screened by Utah Film Center, featuring director David Byars in talkback with KUER-FM RadioWest’s Doug Fabrizio

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The absorbing, intricately structured documentary Public Trust opens with a majestic, joyous montage of America’s public lands, accompanied by stirring orchestral music and narrated by journalist Hal Herring. However, the film quickly segues into the public land debates, which are anything but majestic or joyous. These lands, Herring says, are as quintessential to the American … Read more

Utah Film Center sets livestream event featuring BOSS: The Black Experience in Business documentary; panel with Utah Juneteenth Freedom and Heritage

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A significant epiphany in the exceptional documentary BOSS: The Black Experience in Business is how director Stanley Nelson chronicles everything that Black entrepreneurship has come up against through more than three centuries of history, yet still achieving many of American business’ greatest innovations. Absorbing, lucid and never overwhelming, this exquisitely synthesized case of history, which … Read more

Utah Film Center’s livestream of What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael will feature talkback with director Rob Garver, Time film critic Stephanie Zacharek

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Film critic Pauline Kael emerged during one of Hollywood’s most significant transitional periods of The New Hollywood, followed almost immediately by the first wave of modern blockbusters. Of Jaws, she called it “the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made… [with] more zest than an early Woody Allen picture, a lot more electricity, [and] it’s … Read more

Utah Arts Festival launches virtual platform of Festival Vibes Fridays today for the month of June

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Normally for four days in June, Library Square and the surrounding civic campus in downtown Salt Lake City are transformed into a village of arts and culture for the Utah Arts Festival (UAF), the state’s largest multi-disciplinary gathering of its kind, drawing between 70,000 and 80,000 visitors annually. Despite the inevitable decision in March to … Read more

Expanding the theatrical library during the pandemic: Plan-B Theatre adds 7 short plays from Utah theatrical artists of color to the national Play At Home initiative; its free, public app

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One of the most formidable challenges in the COVID-19 pandemic, where live productions have ground to a near-complete standstill, is to keep the engine of creating new work going, especially when it still is unclear when the performing arts will return to an appreciable state of producing work. One national project has been the #PlayAtHome … Read more

Revisiting the Malheur occupation: Utah Film Center sets livestream event with No Man’s Land documentary

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was originally published June 1 but as the Utah Film Center has rescheduled the livestream event of this documentary to June 23 at 7 p.m., The Utah Review is republishing this feature review today. Viewers also should take note that another film by the same director (David Garrett Byars), the 2020 … Read more