The 11th Great Salt Lake Fringe (GSLF) is in the books. Once again, the venue of the Alliance Theater, connected to the Utah Arts Alliance, at Trolley Square, was ideal for this event, along with the MadKing Fellowship Theater at The Gateway. This year’s edition with 23 shows was the strongest in quality and writing … Read more
Starting its second decade, the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival will feature 23 shows, many from outstanding indie theater companies in three venues, during the event which will run from July 24 to Aug. 3, in downtown Salt Lake City. The event will take place at the main hall and the black box at the … Read more
Becoming more popular than its precursor “dream on,” the slangy derisive “in your dreams!” quickly took hold in the 1980s, making it painfully aware that despite desiring so much for something to happen, it will never be. With eight miniature scenes by four Utah playwrights, presented to a tiny audience of six persons per performance, … Read more
More apparent every year, the Utah Enlightenment is audacious, experimental and unflinching in its artistic entrepreneurship. In 2018, the pool for considering the most definitive moments of the Utah Enlightenment was as expansive and diverse as ever. The Utah Review presents the top ten moments for 2018, precisely because of promise and strength among its … Read more
More than the first half of Sackerson’s marvelously inventive premiere production of The Distance of the Moon overflows with magical expectations. Weaving together the lines of Italo Calvino’s short story converted to dialogue, the story line additions of playwright Morag Shepherd, the spot-on choreography of Breanne Saxton and the translucent sound design of Shawn Francis … Read more
In Hindsight, Sackerson’s premiere of Morag Shepherd’s newest play that is performed in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City at indoor and outdoor locations, Ford (Connor Nelis Johnson) and Chase (Tyler Fox) compete to win the heart of Lorraine (McKenzie Steele Foster). Two men could not be more different. Ford is playful, unabashedly romantic … Read more
Look at any display ad touting a city’s downtown district. The images focus less on a venue such as a restaurant, shop or bar than on the people’s faces. It is about the convivial, romantic experience of city life. The spaces of downtown are empty until they are filled with the stories of the people … Read more
In one of opera’s most famous and most captivating arias, Tosca sings Vissi d’arte, which translates literally to “I lived for art.” The aria from this Giacomo Puccini opera is an anguished prayer because Tosca, a singer, faces the most impossible choice. To save her lover (the painter Cavaradossi) from the death sentence, she must … Read more
It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to … Read more
Two local masters of minimalistic theater are staging plays about children this fall — though stark contrasts in treatment. One is a macabre junk opera take on old German stories about children who misbehave or refuse to follow sound advice. The other is a new play about two siblings grieving over the loss of their … Read more