EDITOR’S NOTE: For preview coverage of the 50th Utah Arts Festival, which runs June 18-21, The Utah Review is presenting individual or group profiles of artists, performers, entertainers and some newcomers to the event. The curtain raiser highlights the history of the Festival which is marking its golden anniversary. BANDALOOP, among the most prominent pioneers of vertical dance, returns to UAF for the fourth time, having appeared in 2005. 2013 and 2018. Once again, the Oakland-based arts company will perform on the 240-foot-high curving glass façade of the City Library, as part of a June tour in four cities featuring a work with ecological roots that will resonate with collective concerns about the Great Salt Lake’s ecological crisis, as the dance artists perform FLOCK while integrating company repertoire pieces including Downstream and its new creation, life || lines, all with an original score featuring music by four composers. Salt Lake Acting Company will appear for the second time at the festival, offering a sample from its upcoming summer show, The Gaslight Zone. Make-and-take opportunities will be among the most extensive in history, with Make Salt Lake as well as Secondhand Salamander which is bringing back the classic Mad Hatter project, and, of course, the Kids’ Art Yard. Urban Arts is offering its largest live graffiti mural installation featuring eight artists in four Festival campus locations, while a row of several other artists will be demonstrating their creative process in real time. Holdman Studios, based in Lehi with an international portfolio of commissions to create stained glass in religious and civic buildings, including a recent update to the Utah State Capitol rotunda, is offering an unprecedented series of free workshops for participants to create their own stained glass artwork. The City Library auditorium will be the home to the 23rd edition of the international Fear No Film program, with 84 short films on a slate of 15 programs, the second largest in the event’s history. Of course, dance, who wears the empress jewels in performing arts, will be represented by Repertory Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Sock Opera Dance, and, of course, the ever-popular 1520 Arts, which will feature Trash Panda Drum Group and competitions featuring Sol Tribe as part of the Salt Open Styles Battle along with the Red Bull Dance Your Style battle and a collaboration with Utah Valley University’s ESPRIT in Rep Your Set Choreo Competition, with choreographers who specialize variously in hip hop, contemporary, salsa, reggaeton, afro, popping. Headliners this year include Digable Planets, well known among jazz musicians as well as hip hop artists (June 18); Yola, six-time Grammy-nominated artist, songwriter, and actor (June 19); Austin-based musician Alejandro Rose-Garcia, better known as Shakey Graves, who has been cited for creating new musical experiences tailored to each fan, ranging from Bandcamp-exclusive releases to hosting interactive scavenger hunts while on tour (June 20) and Rubblebucket, a band well known for its hybrid genre blend of psychedelia and electronic dance music (June 21). For tickets and more information, see the Utah Arts Festival website.
SALT LAKE ACTING COMPANY
Making its second appearance ever at the Utah Arts Festival, Salt Lake Acting Company (SLAC) will offer two sneak-peek performances of its summer show The Gaslight Zone, which will open June 24 and run through Aug. 16.
The pop culture pantheon is once again set to be celebrated in this year’s show, with a writing team of Austin Archer, Olivia Custodio and Penelope Caywood, and directed and choreographed by Cynthia Fleming. Zach Hansen is music director.
Last year’s SLAC summer show, The Secret Lives of the Real Wives in the Salt Lake Hive, reached deep into the spice cabinet, ensuring that the 2025 edition mogged its predecessors. As The Utah Review noted, “Hands down, SLAC now has the secret formula for satirical sendups that bite with unsparing true epiphanies while keeping the audiences in rip-roaring mode to absorb the incredibly hilarious bounty of comedy and talent. This was, by far, the tightest summer show SLAC has produced.”
This year’s show is poised to meet and exceed these expectations, as it takes on the epic television series, The Twilight Zone. Festival patrons will be able to get a sample of this summer show on June 19 and June 20, 5:50 p.m., on the Festival Stage. The company will perform parodies of Willkommen, We’re All in this Together and I’ll Make a Man Out of You.
One of the strongest features of SLAC’s summer show is that Custodio, Archer and Caywood can pivot and update the show during the summer run, including swapping out songs or details based on breaking news or updates about personalities who are being satirized. Indeed, the world is relentlessly unstable these days and the writers recognize that if the SLAC summer show is to maximally reflect the zeitgeist of the moment, so let it be rewritten.
In the 2024 show, Close Encounters in the Beehive, aliens were sent from deep space to investigate the strange land of Deseret and its quirky Mormon inhabitants and to report back to their Overlord (an intergalactic Elon Musk) for determining whether or not the planet should be spared from annihilation. The show’s closing scene, which included a song set to You Gotta Have a Gimmick from the musical Gypsy, parodied the Trump-Biden presidential debate.
However, deep into the show run, when Biden was preparing to drop out of his reelection campaign, Fleming had already sent a heads-up text to Custodio, who was in New York City at the time. Custodio immediately contacted Caywood, who was in Chicago and they produced a new scene and a song which was ready for the show on the next day. Given that The Gaslight Zone will run through August 16, it is highly probable that at least one major revision will be needed.
“All of us know each other so well, including Cynthia [Fleming], that we can guess what she’s going to say or request ahead of time,” Custodio explained. “This saves us a lot of steps because we’re on the same page so much of the time. But it also is weird having a structure and then being completely flexible at all times, especially if some big news drops, It doesn’t matter if you already thought you were done with the final draft because at a particular moment, you might have to rewrite your favorite scene or a song that you loved that isn’t as relevant anymore.”
Of course, some of the most famous Twilight Zone episodes found their way into the summer show’s satire. One came from the first season, which aired in 1960, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, a brilliant take on mob mentality and mass hysteria. The episode focuses on bizarre occurrences on a small neighborhood street after what seems like a meteor streaking through the sky. As H.P. Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
Another, also from the first season, is Eye of the Beholder, brilliantly flips the syntax of the famous adage, as the story shows how norms of beauty and ugliness are artificially constructed by society and the state. A woman is forced to undergo a series of surgeries to normalize her appearance per the guidelines of dominant society. The creative team also wrote commercials, just as they might have played during the primetime days of The Twilight Zone, which have been filmed and will be inserted at select spots during the performance.
Without giving too much away ahead of the time, Custodio said the show has scenes dealing with ICE and Charlie Kirk, for example. The challenge, as she explained, is to make these heavy, terrible topics digestible and hopefully a little funny. Obviously, Spencer Cox, Utah’s governor, and the uproar about AI and data centers also are referenced.
As for Serling’s place for parody in The Gaslight Zone, the writers decided to avoid creating a straightforward imitation and have cast the narrator who has received a fabulous,colorful glow-up as a stunning regal beauty, which will be played by Scotty Fletcher.
Fletcher said, in an interview with The Utah Review, that he started watching the classic episodes which were available on Netflix, when he was growing up. Fletcher added he still gets chills hearing the sound of shattered glass in the introduction of each episode. While he demonstrated a convincing imitation of Serling’s voice and signature cadences of speaking. Fletcher was thrilled to take on the transformation of the narrator into a drag persona of unparalleled beauty. “I’m very beautiful and I want people to not be scared of how beautiful I’m going to be in the costumes.” Fletcher said. Hence, the narrator for The Gaslight Zone is unique as a contemporary manifestation of the sirens in Greek mythology: irresistibly seductive with an alluring voice and mesmerizing beauty. The only difference is that instead of being deadly, Fletcher’s character is comedy and wisdom rendered in the most fabulous glow that has ever shined on an SLAC stage.
For tickets and more information, see the Salt Lake Acting Company website.