The 2022-23 season of Broadway at the Eccles includes "Les Misérables" and the Utah debuts of "Moulin Rouge!" and "Ain't Too Proud."
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Your mental image of the typical Mormon family could probably use a few updates. In Utah, people both inside and outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can easily conjure the stereotype—a happily married mom and dad with three or four perfect kids ready to multiply and replenish the Earth into the eternities.
Not so fast. As of last year, the majority of adults in the Church are single, whether they’re divorced, widowed or never married. That’s a significant change, especially in a religion that’s especially fixated on traditional families. The complex, often painful experiences of single members of the Church are explored in Aftershock, a new play at Plan-B Theatre by Utah playwright Iris Salazar, herself a single Mormon.
Shaken from both the pandemic and the 2020 Salt Lake City Earthquake, Teah (Estephani Cerros) nervously attends a therapist’s office for her first visit. While waiting for the appointment, Teah has a bizarre dream—her counseling session has turned into an audition and her therapist has turned into Dr. Love Dearest (Yolanda Stange), a host who evaluates Teah for a TV dating show. Teah has no interest in being the next Bachelorette, but with Dr. Love Dearest’s encouragement, she shares stories from her life as a single Mexican woman in the Church.
Salazar is a writer with a perspective worth sharing—her experiences are both specific and broadly relatable. (Even if you’ve never stepped foot in a single’s ward—Church congregations specifically you’ve probably felt disillusioned by romance or stifled by cultural expectations.) It’s rare—and refreshing—to see art tackle the complicated feelings many of us feel about religion, especially in Utah. Both Aftershock’s protagonist and playwright are devout Church members, but the play is unafraid to make explicit and implicit critiques of the faith and its culture. Salazar feels no need to evangelize or sugarcoat tough realities—the play includes potentially triggering subject matter, frank discussions of sex and swearing, which is confusingly bleeped. Still, Teah (and, seemingly, Salazar) embraces her religion’s teachings and doctrinal rules, most notably about sex and dating. This nuanced treatment of faith and spirituality is the play’s strong suit.
While Salazar’s point-of-view is refreshing, much of Aftershock is frustratingly uneven. The play’s initial premise—a therapy session that turns into a dating show—is a strong idea, and Stange brings a needed burst of energy as the hammy host. Unfortunately, though, the conceit is all but abandoned, and the play turns into a straightforward therapy session as Teah describes key moments of her life. This not only sidelines Stange, who has little to do but nod supportively as Teah spills her guts, but it abandons the comic potential of the play’s initial idea. Why not introduce three single’s ward bachelors, a la The Dating Game, to illustrate Teah’s frustrations with dating? Why not start with a parody of a specific show—say, The Bachelor or Love is Blind—and launch into more serious depictions of Teah’s experiences. Without a clear concept, Aftershock flounders, and the play’s return-to-reality ending is more confusing than satisfying.
Salazar’s script is bursting with ideas—in barely over an hour, Teah essentially tells her entire life story, with anecdotes covering not only religion and dating but also race, gender, alcohol abuse, mental illness, harassment, women’s health care, the pandemic and body image. With such a wide breadth of subject matter, Aftershock doesn’t have time to dive past the surface level, and awkward pacing dulls the narrative’s impact. Two early scenes about nightmarish roommates drag without a clear purpose, while Teah’s explanation of her dating history comes and goes with little room to breathe. The capable ensemble—Danny Borba, Pedro Flores, Liza Shoell and Sam Torres—plays figures from Teah’s past, but the writing is too rushed for them to make an impact.
Despite the play’s missteps, Salazar’s unique voice is still a welcome addition to Utah theater. Plenty of stories address dating and sex, but it’s more rare to see a play that grapples with life as a single person in a culture obsessed with marriage. Teah struggles to be understood by friends both outside and inside the church and her virginity is treated as a punch line. At times she feels lonely, but the script also challenges the idea that romantic love is the only avenue for fulfillment. Cerros’s emotionally open performance captures Teah’s pain, but the best moments of Aftershock prove that there is more to this character than a relationship status.
Aftershock will be in-person and streaming at Plan-B Theatre through April 17. For tickets and more information, visit Plan-B’s website. Read more about Utah theater.
If you’re even a casual rom-com fan, the basic plot of Fireflies, a play by Matthew Barber now at Pioneer Theatre Company, should be pretty familiar. You could probably get a good idea of where things are going from just the playbill summary—the narrative doesn’t depart much from the expected beats of an enemies-to-lovers arc. Despite, or maybe because of, the script’s if-it-ain’t-broke philosophy, Fireflies is a comforting, crowd-pleasing success. Sometimes, all you need is a pleasurable, well-told story with characters—who, in one notable way, depart from the expected mold—worth rooting for.
In a small Texas town, retired schoolteacher Eleanor (Joy Franz) lives alone on her parents’ property. (Both her mom and dad died years before the play began.) Though she is a respected figure in the community, Eleanor’s life is mostly a solitary one, aside from frequent, usually unannounced visits from her busybody neighbor Grace (Joy Lynn Jacobs). When a storm damages a roof on her property, Abel (David Manis), a drifter in town, offers to make repairs. While the prickly Eleanor is initially wary of Abel, their relationship slowly builds from distrust to cautious friendliness to an undeniable mutual attraction.
Fireflies stands out in one obvious way—both Eleanor and Abel are in their 70s. Onstage, and in pop culture more generally, it’s rare to see older characters as protagonists, especially in a story about new romance. Eleanor’s fear of aging, which is discussed simply and movingly, is a throughline in the play, including in a funny, fantastical scene where Eleanor imagines herself as an artifact at the natural history museum. The script’s matter-of-fact treatment of mortality adds dimension to the plot’s more conventional elements, and the characters’ ages are both central to the story and no-big-deal—the play reminds audiences that new experiences can happen at any age.
A veteran of the stage for more than five decades, Franz leads the ensemble like the seasoned pro that she is. She is convincing as both a lovable curmudgeon and a lonely, sometimes vulnerable woman unmoored by aging and grief. The story just wouldn’t work without the chemistry between Eleanor and Abel, and both Franz and Manis are adept at portraying the couple’s slow burn—their opposites-attract connection always makes emotional sense. As the nosy neighbor, Jacobs gives a broad, lively performance. She gleefully chews on a sausage-gravy thick Texas accent, wears the hell out of a pink church lady ensemble (the costumes are by Brenda Van Der Wiel) and brings just enough pathos to prevent Grace from turning into a caricature. (Rounding out the cast, Tito Livas plays a small role as the dimwitted Sheriff Claymire, Eleanor’s former student.)
While characters occasionally spout nuggets of folksy wisdom, this intentionally modest play rarely strains to focus on anything more than the characters and their relationships. The appropriately low-key direction by Kareem Fahmy emphasizes quiet, simple moments, which all happen over the course of one week. Like Eleanor’s kitchen, the setting for almost all of the play, Fireflies is unassuming, warm and familiar. For audiences of any age, these characters, and the actors who play them, are easy to spend time with.
Fireflies will be at Pioneer Theatre Company through April 16. For tickets and more information, visit PTC’s website. Read more theater reviews from Salt Lake.
More than 13 years after its first Broadway performance, Passing Strange is finally making its Utah debut. The raucous rock musical will be performed at Salt Lake Acting Company from April 6-May 15.
Written by Stew and Heidi Rodewald, both members of the rock band The Negro Problem, Passing Strange follows the artistic and personal coming-of-age of a young Black man in 1970s California, referred to only as Youth (Carleton Bluford). Youth, seeking what he calls “the real,” may be inspired by the gospel music he hears in church, but he still rejects the conservative Christian faith of his mother (Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin). With commentary from the wry, fourth-wall-breaking narrator (Lee Palmer), Youth travels to Europe in search of “the real,” diving headfirst into a messy exploration of sex, family and identity.
Though Passing Strange was embraced by critics and won a Tony Award, the musical is an underappreciated cult favorite rather than a big mainstream hit. Still, there remains a fan base for the show and its eclectic score, which features energetic rock songs with influences of soul, gospel and avant-garde music. One of those fans, Spike Lee, filmed the Broadway production in a documentary that premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. (That’s not the musical’s only Utah connection. The creative team first developed Passing Strange at the Sundance Theater Lab in 2004 and 2005.) Now, Utah audiences will have their first chance to see the musical live onstage.
Before leading this production at Salt Lake Acting Company, director Todd Underwood was a fan of the show’s score, especially after watching the cast’s memorable performance at the 2008 Tony Awards. “I need to know this piece because this one little number is blowing my mind,” he thought to himself. Now, Underwood’s appreciation for the musical has only grown. “This piece continues to reveal itself to me every single day…It can change people, can heal people, can give voice to things that maybe you didn’t know needed.”
For Underwood, the narrative of Passing Strange contains poignant parallels to his own life. He grew up in Tuscumbia, Ala. in a devoutly religious household—his grandpa even founded the church his family attended. He too discovered his love of music through the church—and eventually rejected some of the teachings he grew up with. After coming out of the closet in college, Underwood took his first professional job touring with a production of Blackbirds of Broadway in Europe, a period that was formative in his own self-discovery.
As Underwood discovered his own personal connections to the material, he encouraged his cast to bring their own experiences and identities to their performances. Underwood describes the protagonist’s journey as “finding what Blackness means for him and how he can be his most empowered self in that Blackness.” To facilitate that same journey with his actors, Underwood’s process began with what one cast member called an “emotional inventory”—in one-on-one interviews, he asked each cast member “what was your search for your Blackness?” Underwood wanted to emphasize that racial identity was a process of discovery, not a fixed state. “It’s a constant search to see where you fit in, in the skin that you’re in,” he explains.
While Underwood says he always tries to create a safe, trusting environment for every production he directs, his experience with Passing Strange has been unique. “There aren’t a lot of all-Black shows that speak to Blackness, so to be able to share and be open and honest in a room like this is incredible,” he says. “There’s a freedom that I wish could go on in all spaces.” As the cast has shared their own stories, Underwood has gone through his own emotional inventory. He cites one particularly poignant line from Passing Strange—speaking with an important mentor, Youth says, “I don’t feel as ugly as I did yesterday.” “My journey is realizing that I’m not ugly because of my skin color, that I’m not ugly because I’m gay and I’m not ugly because I’m black and gay,” Underwood says.
While Passing Strange is rooted in the specific experiences of Black identity, Underwood says the musical is “universal in its themes—love, family, searching, acceptance.” “You learn a lot going to the theater, especially theater like this, where you are probably being exposed to something that you’ve never even thought of before. And I hope that the ride that [audiences] go on is one of joy and self-reflection and light.”
For more information and ticket sales, visit Salt Lake Acting Company’s website. Read more about theater in SLC.
Season subscriptions for Utah Symphony and Utah Opera are available through April 21 and individual tickets go on sale June 14.
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A small-town story of surprising romance, Fireflies, a 2017 play by Matthew Barber, will have its Utah premiere at Pioneer Theatre Company on April 1. In contrast with PTC’s last production—the brash, energetic musical Something Rotten!—Fireflies is an intimate, gently funny romantic comedy-drama focused primarily on two characters.
Based on Annette Sanford’s 2003 novel Eleanor & Abel, Fireflies is set in a fictional Texas Gulf Coast town in the mid-1990s. Eleanor (Joy Franz), a retired teacher, lives alone and is beloved in her community, including by her gossipy neighbor Grace (Joy Lynn Jacobs) and her former student Eugene (Tito Livas). After a storm damages a house on her property, a drifter named Abel (David Manis) begins repairing the home while forging an unexpected connection with Eleanor.
Fireflies’ premise may be simple, but its protagonists are all-to-rare in contemporary theater—they are both complex, fully drawn characters in their 70s. Director Kareem Fahmy says he was drawn to what he calls an “extremely delightful” script for this reason. “It’s a great reminder that love is really possible at any time of one’s life if you open yourself up to it,” he says. “This play really does show how these characters dismantle those barriers for themselves.” Barber was interested in exploring how characters with more lived experience approach the new beginnings of love and romance. “Our willingness to open ourselves to change later in life may be just as strong as when we were young, but that willingness is now up against an equally strong pull to not let go of what we had, even if what we had is now only a memory,” he said in an interview with Long Wharf Theatre, where the play premiered.
“Fireflies has all the traditional markings of a beautiful love story but because these two people have found each other later in their lives, it brings a whole other perspective to this fun, funny and touching romance,” said Karen Azenberg, Pioneer Theatre Company’s Artistic Director in a press release.
Leading the cast, Franz is making her PTC debut. She has performed onstage for more than five decades, with Broadway credits including Pippin, Company and Into the Woods, the latter two with Stephen Sondheim. Fahmy called Eleanor “one of these incredibly disarming characters,” describing the role as “intelligent, caustic and funny.” Manis is both a Broadway and Pioneer Theatre veteran who was most recently seen on Utah stages in PTC’s Much Ado About Nothing.
Fahmy, who previously directed a staged reading of The Fifth Domain and a virtual production of A Christmas Carol at Pioneer Theatre Company, wanted to hire a racially diverse cast for this play. Increasing opportunities for theater artists of color has been an important mission for Fahmy. “There [are] all of these barriers in place that prevented directors like me from getting opportunities,” says Fahmy, who is Middle Eastern. He recently created the BIPOC Director Database, a crowdsourced spreadsheet that connects directors of color at various stages of their career with other theater professionals across the country. The database was partly inspired by a conversation with Azenberg, who wanted a simple way to connect with diverse artists outside of the (very white) theater community in Utah. “Hopefully there’s going to be a much greater diversity of people in these directing jobs over the next several years,” Fahmy says.
Though the play does address themes of aging and late-in-life love, Fahmy hopes the play will connect with audiences of all ages. “For a play that deals with love, it’s also dealing a lot with loss and what happens when you get to a certain age where the people around you start to perish,” he says. “There’s a beautiful universality in that.”
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After a wild, up-and-down Season 2, the cast of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City gathered on a gloriously tacky winter-wonderland set to dig into all of this season’s juiciest drama. The women watched the final episodes, including Lisa’s explosive hot mic moment, hours before taping the reunion, so emotions were raw and every cast member came in with several chips on their shoulders. With a full season behind us, Andy and a host of viewers (including a Twitter user hilariously named “ugly adjacent,”) asked the questions that have been on everyone’s minds. Let’s dig into, in the words of Heather Gay, this “real, fake and fucked up” reunion with 10 takeaways.
1) Hi baby gorgeous!
After 21 truly unhinged episodes, pretty much every cast member had drama to reexamine or dirty laundry to air out. It was surprising, then, how much screen time was dedicated to Lisa—she was the undisputed center of gravity of this reunion. Everyone besides Lisa’s longtime friend Jennie had a bone to pick with her, and she spent what seemed like hours backed in a corner, forced to defend herself. Plenty of the criticism was justified, especially about the hot mic rant (more on that later), but I left feeling a little sorry for Lisa—she is far from the only one with bad behavior worth addressing! Still, the Lisa Barlow show had plenty of iconic moments. She is forced to explain why she compared Heather to a Lego and gets in a fight about whether she only rents yachts for Instagram pictures. She comes prepared with printed iMessage screenshots to defend her case—and pulls out reading glasses when she’s really ready to share the receipts. And in one of several litigations over Lisa and Meredith’s friendship, Andy tells Lisa that her support of Meredith is “not landing with her” and she protests, “okay, it is landing with me.” Lisa IS the main character.
2) The bad weather report
So much has changed between Seasons 1 and 2, but all I got from Heather and Whitney during these episodes was an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Just as in the Season 1 reunion, the cousins focused almost all of their energy on taking down Lisa. Heather lands some solid burns—she calls Lisa “a caricature of some teen magazine she read in 8th Grade that says ‘how to be a cool mean girl’”—but for the most part their crusade just made me tired. These three seemed to be on better terms by the end of this season, their rivalry always felt convoluted anyway and Heather and Whitney spent hardly any time talking about the (more interesting) things they got up to this season.
3) Lisa Barlow does not care when the cameras are rolling
You would think that after reality TV cameras caught you calling one of your closest friends a “fucking whore” behind closed doors, you would be quite sensitive about the right time to share your thoughts while mic’d up. Lisa, though, has a thrilling disregard for when the cameras are (and aren’t) rolling. Though the cast is discouraged from talking to each other during breaks, she can’t resist apologizing to Meredith for her hot mic rant. She also, hilariously, explains that her rage came from a rumor that Meredith had made fun of her house. (Hell hath no fury like a woman who is sensitive about her recent remodel.) Meredith is in no mood for quick forgiveness— the wounds are still too fresh. Later, she goes to hug Heather and Whitney in between takes and the three makeup (ish) when Heather says her intentions were to defend, not attack, Lisa. This is…certainly not what happened on camera, but there’s still a glimmer of hope for these three fan favorites to set aside their differences.
4) Meredith engages
After a Season 1 where Meredith was best known for “disengaging” whenever a fight got interesting, she came into this season ready to stand up for herself. From her long-simmering anger at Jen and Lisa to her inexplicable defense of Mary, Meredith had some explaining to do during the reunion. In easily the most sympathetic appearance of the entire cast, she explained that her strong emotions this season sprung from the death of her father and other family issues she wasn’t comfortable sharing on camera. She appeared to be genuinely shaken up by her difficult year, and her statements were a reminder that these women aren’t just TV characters—they’re real people experiencing real pain. (Plus, she got the chance to use her lawyer skills to carefully build her case against Lisa, which was a lot of fun.)
5) All hail Andy Cohen
As a Real Housewives newbie, forgive me for what is likely an extremely basic observation: Andy Cohen is very good at this. He asks extremely probing questions with just enough tact to get the answers he wants. He pushes the right buttons to extract drama, but mediates the fights before they boil into unbridled chaos. And he’s genuinely, off-the-cuff funny. Hosting this marathon of a reunion can’t be easy, and Andy shows that there is real skill in making reality TV this stupidly addictive.
6) There’s Something About Mary
While viewers already learned weeks ago that Mary Cosby skipped the reunion, essentially giving up her spot on the show, the other cast members discover in real time that Mary won’t be showing up. Upset by the show’s treatment of her church and her racist comments towards Jennie, Mary refuses to come and defend herself. That doesn’t stop the cast from discussing her general rudeness to the other cast members, Meredith and Mary’s friendship and, most importantly, the allegations that she runs a cult. Even Meredith is uninterested in fullheartedly defending Mary, and without Mary there to respond for herself, the questions surrounding the series’ most confounding figure are left frustratingly unanswered.
7) The other elephants in the room
Mary isn’t the only person whose presence is needed at the reunion. Lisa and Whitney rehash the catering drama from Angie’s fundraiser (ugh), which is essentially useless without Angie there to explain herself. Uncomfortably, the women also discuss the relationship between Mary and Cameron, a friend of Lisa’s and a former Faith Temple member who passed away after appearing in this season. Considering his death, I think both Bravo and the cast should have avoided talking about him altogether. I strongly agree with this Tweet that says the long-suffering sprinter van driver Kevin should have been invited to tell his side of the story. This poor man has been through so much!
8) Jennie’s first (and last) reunion
Part one begins with a disclaimer that the discovery of Jennie’s racist comments on social media, and her subsequent firing, happened after the reunion was filmed. In a richly ironic moment, Jennie spends a large chunk of time discussing Mary’s anti-Asian comments and racism more broadly. Of course, Jennie’s own (stupid!) opinions don’t discount the real racism she experiences, but it’s cringeworthy to hear her preach that she and Mary should support each other as fellow people of color knowing her own anti-Black comments. After Andy shares that Mary doesn’t believe that Black people can be racist, Jennie says, “Everyone is capable of being racist.” She really walked right into that one.
9) The Real Husbands of SLC
Justin, Sharrieff, John, Duy and Seth (virtually) all joined their wives for the reunion, and they were mostly left unscathed in a charming appearance. Even Seth, who I usually find obnoxious, comes across well, and says he acted like “an ass” to distract Meredith from her grief. Justin is asked about a lawsuit against LifeVantage, the MLM he works for, so maybe there will be more legal drama even after the Shah trial. John…is there. Everyone gives Duy the side-eye as he tries to explain why he suggested bringing in a sister wife to have more children, but we won’t see him again, so whatever. Sharrieff gets the toughest questions—he’s asked if he knew anything about Jen’s alleged fraud and money laundering, which he denies, and he is directly asked about rumors that Jen has cheated on him. Sharrieff’s comments are unlikely to quell suspicion about Jen’s businesses (or his own involvement and knowledge), but he is easy to root for. He’s charismatic, he advocates for Black men to go to therapy and he seems determined to stick by his wife for better and (definitely) worse.
10) Law & Order: Shah Unit
Let’s cut to the chase: the only real surprise in this reunion’s treatment of Jen’s fraud charges is that it took until Part 3 to truly dig into it. She continues to deny that her business practices were illegal. (Duh.) Any time the questions about her case get too specific, she hits Andy with a lawyer-approved “no comment.” (Double duh.) And because Jen always pretends to be contrite for about two minutes before self-sabotaging, she spends a good part of the reunion sniping at her two closest allies, Heather and Lisa. (The biggest duh of all.) Jen does her damnedest to turn her arrest into a case study of racism in the criminal justice system, and while this is certainly an indisputable fact, she is, to put it mildly, not the best messenger for this important issue. Jen still seems resistant to any sort of plea deal, and her trial has been postponed until July, which could very well be after Season 3 wraps up filming.
Relive season 2 of RHOSLC with our weekly recaps and see our archive and track the Real Houswives Journey around Salt Lake City.
After suffering a quiet spell as its previous mall style went out of fashion, The Gateway is taking a turn as unique restaurants and bars are now calling the space…
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At the beginning of the pandemic, some writers pointed out that Shakespeare wrote one of his most acclaimed plays, King Lear, in the middle of a plague. This led to speculation on what brilliant, era-defining work of art would come out of our modern plague. For writers, this was an unnecessary source of added pressure—in the middle of COVID, wasn’t surviving day-to-day enough of an achievement? I didn’t make an ill-advised attempt to write my next Great American Novel, but from a consumer’s perspective, I’m fine if we don’t get a coronavirus-era King Lear. Right now, escapist, joyful, well-crafted entertainment is more than enough. I need—to quote a lyric from Something Rotten!, which is now playing at Pioneer Theatre Company—“something more relaxing and less taxing on the brain.”
A proudly crowd-pleasing love letter to a proudly crowd-pleasing art form, Something Rotten! imagines a ridiculous alternate origin story to the classic musical. In 1590s England, William Shakespeare (Matthew Hydzik) is the most celebrated of the Renaissance playwrights, leaving other writers floundering in his shadow. Brothers Nick (Matt Farcher) and Nigel Bottom (Daniel Plimpton), who lead a struggling theater troupe, need to produce a hit play quickly before losing their patronage. While Nick’s ahead-of-his-time wife Bea (Galyana Castillo) wants to find work and ease the family’s financial burdens, Nick seeks advice from the soothsayer Nostradamus (Robert Anthony Jones) about his next play. Nostradamus gets a spotty vision about the future of theater—the Broadway musical. Though the Elizabethans are initially confused by the concept, Nick and Nigel forge ahead, believing it to be their perfect chance to one-up Shakespeare. Meanwhile, Nigel begins a passionate romance with Portia (Lexi Rabadi), the daughter of a Puritan (Kevin B. McGlynn) who opposes all theater and poetry.
If it’s not clear already, at least 80% of the plot is just an excuse for endless puns and references to both Shakespeare and popular musicals—some obvious, some niche and some in between. Something Rotten! has a throw-everything-at-the-wall approach to comedy. The jokes are all over the place, from genuinely clever to stupid funny to just plain stupid—the cast, though, fully commits to the absurdity, and, sometimes through sheer force of will, most of the bits land.
The universally strong cast, all of whom are clearly having a lot of fun with the material, makes the material succeed. Farcher, a strong singer and dancer in a cast full of them, makes Nick relatable and sympathetic even when the Bottom brother spends a lot of the play acting like, well, an ass. As the sensitive, talented poet of the brother duo, Plimpton is totally charming, providing just enough human-sized emotion to ground the ridiculous farce. Though her character is sometimes underused, Castillo is also willing, completely selling her solo song “Right Hand Man” and providing a necessary female perspective. (In Shakespeare’s lifetime, women weren’t allowed on stage, even to play female characters.) Hydzik may have the most challenging task of all—partly because the role’s originator, Christian Borle, left a signature mark and won a Tony Award for the part and partly because the show’s glammy, leather-clad Shakespeare requires a rock-stars charisma. Luckily, Hydzik makes his own mark as the charming egomaniac who gets under Nick’s skin.
Director and choreographer Karen Azenberg leads the talented ensemble, who effectively parody musicals while adeptly performing some classic musical trademarks, from energetic tap breaks to Fosse-style jazz hands to high-kicking chorus lines. In one inspired touch, an inappropriately chipper song about the Black Death includes subtle nods to our current deadly plague. Set designer George Maxwell builds a storybook version of Elizabethan England that perfectly fits the musical’s daffy alternate reality. Unfortunately, whether it was the sound design or the diction of the performers, it could be difficult to hear some of the music and dialogue. I was familiar with the soundtrack coming in, but newcomers may miss a lot of the best jokes in the show’s fast pacing.
The score, by Karey and Wayne Patrick, fills fairly conventional Broadway-pop compositions to the brim with in-jokes and clever lines. In “A Musical,” an eight-minute song and the play’s highlight, Nostradamus predicts the entire future of musical theater. Jones’ brash, more-is-more performance is exactly what the musical calls for—he steals the show anytime he’s on stage. With callouts to a laundry list of musical favorites, from Les Misérables to A Chorus Line to Rent, the song captures the musical’s tone: a self-aware but loving sendup of the art form, targeted at devotees. In these moments, Something Rotten! both spoofs and delivers the genre’s simple pleasures.
Something Rotten! will be at Pioneer Theatre Company through March 12. For tickets and more information, visit their website. Read more on Salt Lake City theater.
The cinematic Western landscapes and cowboy protagonists of Billy Schenck’s art aren’t just a fantasy—it’s in his DNA. The artist, who spent part of his childhood riding horses and farming cattle in Wyoming, is known as, in his words, one of the “granddaddies” of Western pop art. Though he spent part of his early career in New York City, Schenck, who now lives in New Mexico, fully embraces the Western lifestyle he depicts. In the mid ‘70s, he took the cowboy way of life one step further when a ranch manager taught him to ride bareback and saddle bronc. The only problem? “I was terrible,” he says. “I was getting just nearly killed, falling off one horse after another after another. It was really frustrating because rodeo was in my blood.”
Later in life, Schenck got back on the horse—literally. With the encouragement of a local rancher, he began team penning and ranch sorting. This time, he found much more success: he even won a ranch sorting world championship in 2009. He still ranch sorts in local shows, and is proud to say he had 10 perfect runs in one day. (In ranch sorting, a rider attempts to move ten cattle from one pen to another, in numerical order. A perfect run requires herding the cattle in sequence in 60 seconds.) Schenck, now in his 70s, says, “I take great pride in the fact that I can be that old and still be competitive and just knock the socks off of people on occasions.”
Schenck’s genuine love for the American West—its culture, its iconography, its landscapes—is on full display in his two simultaneous Utah exhibitions: Schenck’s Utah: A Land Less Traveled at Modern West and Billy Schenck: Myth of the West at the Southern Utah Museum of Art.
Schenck’s Utah is the first show of his career to focus entirely on landscape art. In the first decades of his career, landscapes were solely in the background of his figurative and caption paintings. The dramatic red rock mesas of southern Utah, though, have always been integral to Schenck’s work—he says he’s been “inspired by the Utah landscape since almost day one, which would be 52 years ago.” In the early 2000s, he began working on landscapes without figures. Why? “Just to see if I could do it,” he says. Shalee Cooper, Gallery Director of Modern West, was drawn to Schenck’s distinctive interpretations of Utah geography and encouraged Schenck to display his landscape works for this exhibition.
The paintings and serigraphs in Schenck’s Utah feature dramatic shadows and lonely, beautiful expanses of quiet desert. The scenes are quintessentially Utah, but up close, the sharp divisions between colors and shapes feel more surreal—in “Caution Hot Cows,” for example, spindly black tree branches contrast with white clouds, jagged like puzzle pieces. Some works, like “Late Day Monsoons,” feature moody shades of brown and gray; others bring an unexpected vibrancy to stretches of barren land.
To create his paintings, Schenck starts with a road trip—to Monument Valley, Arches National Park or other locations in the southern Utah desert that catch his eye. He photographs rock formations and landscapes and then returns to the studio, where he uses a slide projector to review images for inspiration. “I go through the carousels until I find a group—maybe three, five, 10 slides—and just see how they’ll match up,” he says. He starts with the foreground—usually a dramatic rock formation or sand dune—moves to the middle ground, then the background and finishes with his dramatic skyscapes, developing the color palette as he goes. This process—partly a composite of real locations, partly an exploration of his own imagination—explains the familiar yet otherworldly quality of his work.
At Southern Utah Museum of Art, Billy Schenck: Myth of the West is a career-spanning retrospective that includes works from various points of Schenck’s more than four decades-long career. The exhibition, which includes 25 paintings and three serigraphs, illustrates some of Schenck’s trademarks: a striking, colorful reductivist style, offbeat humor and surprising interpretations of classic Western iconography.
Myth of the West ties Schenck to his varied influences. His idiosyncratic style comes from several directions—the marriage of text and image of Roy Lichtenstein’s caption paintings, the methodology of the photorealists in the 1960s and 70s and even the subject matter of classic Spaghetti Westerns. (After first seeing Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, Schenck thought to himself, “I need to try to do in paintings what this guy has done in film.”) At SUMA, Schenck’s work is paired with one of his key influences—Andy Warhol. Warhol’s Cowboys & Indians includes 10 prints and four trial proofs from Warhol’s last project in the 1980s. For Schenck, this exhibition is a full circle moment—he even worked with Warhol and The Velvet Underground for a brief period in 1966, when Schenck learned from pop art pioneers in New York City. Michael Duchemin, director of the Briscoe Museum in San Antonio, first paired Schenck with Warhol, linking Western artists with the larger pop art tradition. (“I thought it was great for my career. It isn’t gonna affect Andy too much one way or the other,” Schenck quips.)
For Schenck, Myth of the West has been a chance to track the evolution of his work over the decades. This recollection, though, hasn’t slowed him down—in fact, it’s only led to more inspiration. “I’ve got ideas coming out of my ears,” he says. “I can’t even begin to catch up with them at this point.”
For more information on these exhibitions, visit Modern West and SUMA’s websites. Subscribe to Salt Lake magazine for more on life in Utah.
