Email
Print
FeedUtah's Court Jesters
Meet the mischievous minds behind Saturday’s Voyeur
Utahns of all economic, religious, ethnic and political stripes can agree: Our state, no matter how much we may love it, is a mighty strange place.
How many times have you opened a newspaper or caught a TV news broadcast and found yourself asking, “The Legislature did what?” “The mayor gave that job to who?” or “That fella did what to that flamingo where?”
Utah’s innate, unique proclivities—forged by our rugged Western geography, intensely religious political power structure and a serious xenophobic streak—make for great stories. And in the hands of playwrights Nancy Borgenicht and Allen Nevins, those stories make for inspired satire each summer at Salt Lake Acting Company’s Saturday’s Voyeur.
The production celebrates its 30th birthday this year, and its ribald blend of slapstick comedy, musical interludes and noisy interplay between the audience and the actors is an altogether different kind of theater-going experience. Working from a long-held satirical approach—“afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”—Borgenicht and Nevins create a show from scratch each year that inevitably amuses some, offends others and sells a ton of tickets.
Through the years, Borgenicht and Nevins have skewered the short-lived state “porn czar” and dissected the controversial decision to sell a block of Main Street to the LDS Church. They built a show around the maddening road construction before the 2002 Winter Olympics, and their own reporting led to the true story—ripe for Voyeur’s style—of ZCMI employees filing nipples off mannequins before public display.
“It really serves a function in the community as a catharsis for a number of people, as a way for us to serve as the court jester and make fun of the dominant culture and whole political situation,” says David Kirk Chambers, SLAC’s managing director.
Borgenicht has written Saturday’s Voyeur from the beginning, when the show was better known as a spoof of the popular Mormon musical Saturday’s Warrior than as an annual slap at Utah’s powerful people. Nevins joined as a co-writer in 1990, helping freshen the stories of the over-the-top stereotypical Mormon family that starred in each version of Voyeur until 1996.
That year, the duo ended the show with a portion called “Phatman of the Opera,” a musical skit blending the Enid Greene Waldholtz political scandal and the phenomenon of the touring Phantom of the Opera arriving in Utah for the first time. That bit of experimentation led to the version of Voyeur we know today—an annual look back at some of Utah’s best strange-but-true moments from the previous year.
“The radar is up every day,” Borgenicht says of gathering material for the show. “You save stuff all year long, because we have to start [writing] in November. And the thing is cast before it’s written. It’s cast in January, so we have to have some idea of what we’re looking for.”
“The difficulty is in trying to predict what has legs,” Nevins adds.
“Studies have shown that our memory, our recall, is only about 30 days or 60 days. For big things! So little things that only got a week’s worth of press, people think, ‘What was that again? Did that happen this year?’”
If finding material is a challenge, so is the fact that breaking news at any point during the show’s run can have drastic consequences. What if one of the comedy’s spoofed-upon characters dies in real life? What if there was another terrorist attack the summer after 9/11, during the show’s run?
Last year—a musical revue chronicling Rocky Anderson’s two terms as Salt Lake City mayor—one quick-thinking actor added Anderson’s hallway dustup with developer Dell Loy Hansen to the script midway through the show’s run. How could he resist, when his character’s real-life doppelganger was saying things like “I’ll kick your ass!” in front of reporters?
Anderson is one of the few public figures to see himself get the full Voyeur treatment in person; Borgenicht says he came five times last year. Former Gov. Mike Leavitt had one of his people check out the show one year when he was in office, but the aide never brought her boss back to see it himself.
“The public personalities are used to being public personalities, so we don’t get anything too negative [feedback-wise],” Nevins says. “We did get a real negative comment from [former Salt Lake Mayor] Deedee Corradini one year, when we did a joke about her and Leona Helmsley sharing a jail cell. She did not think that was funny.”
No doubt the audience thought it was hilarious. There is certainly a preaching-to-the-choir quality to Voyeur; the audiences are typically made up of politically progressive folks who read the newspaper every day and are looking for a chuckle at the expense of the patriarchal, right-leaning society they find themselves living in.
The first time you see Saturday’s Voyeur, it’s hard to believe such an openly anarchic bit of theater is occurring so close to the government and church institutions it’s lampooning so trenchantly. Add the fact that Voyeur is SLAC’s only cabaret-style production of the year—meaning food and drinks (adult beverages included) are allowed in the theater during the show—and you end up with a show that is part comedy, part pep rally for local lefties.
“The show’s evolved as the town’s evolved,” Borgenicht says. “The show chronicles our lives, you know? Every year it does, in some way or another.”
Do you like what you read? Subscribe to Salt Lake Magazine »
