'Copters & Casseroles

Sister Dottie S. Dixon provides more real emotional heft than Miss Saigon.

POSTED // May 13,2009 - Along the way, there's room for plenty of fun at the expense of Dottie's unique manner of speaking, including an audience-participation lesson in how to speak Spanish (Fork)...

Beau Gesture

Ririe-Woodbury celebrates 45 years with dances looking beneath the Surfaces

POSTED // Apr 22,2009 - Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company Artistic Director Charlotte Boye-Christensen wants to demonstrate the company’s formidable range, and offer audience members three distinct pieces that will challenge their perceptions of time and space. And, of course, she wants to entertain.

Di Esperienza & End Days

Arts and Ends: Talking with the Mona Lisa in Di Esperienza, and with Jesus in End Days.

POSTED // Apr 8,2009 - The tension in these framing sequences provides for some of the play's most intriguing exchanges, though, it also exposes the extent to which the triangle of the three works isn't entirely equilateral.

Forbidden Loves

Romeo & Juliet and Stop Kiss deliver bittersweet theatrical valentines.

POSTED // Feb 19,2009 - This has always been a problematic play for me. What starts out as a bawdy satire on foolish young love takes, well, a bit of a turn. Either that, or its the most brilliant and misinterpreted dark comedy of all time. Im going to stick with the traditional reading, though.

Theater | Good to Fair: Short Shorts and My Fair Lady kick off the Salt Lake City theater season.

POSTED // Sep 24,2008 - Short Shorts Festival Wasatch Theatre Company’s Page-to Stage Short Shorts Festival incorporates ingredients that could make for a long and unrewarding night of theater: nonexistent sets, sparse props, and previously unproduced scripts by local...

A&E | DVD Homework: Prep for new theatrical releases with some film schooling.

POSTED // Sep 3,2008 - It’s the home stretch of the movie year, when the cinematic floodgates open and we are deluged by all the movies hoping for Oscar glory and other year-end awards notices … not to mention all the goofy counter-programming. So why not pile...

Theater | I Wanted That Praise: Altar Boyz wants to save your soul with smart satire

POSTED // Jul 9,2008 - My mom always wanted me to be an altar boy. Pretty much every Sunday at Mass, she would nudge me whenever the frocked youths did something cool like swing the censer during the procession, retrieve the hosts in anticipation of the miracle of transubstantiation,...

Theater | Truth to Power: Confessional drama and local satire light up summer stages

POSTED // Jun 11,2008 - The Tricky Part The lights don’t go down at the beginning of Plan-B Theatre Company’s production of The Tricky Part—not before David Spencer strolls to the front of the audience. Already in character as playwright Martin Moran, he conversationally...

Theater | Kick in the Asana: Stephen Brown revisits New Age satire in Revenge of Yoga the Musical

POSTED // Jun 4,2008 - From the very beginning, SB Dance impresario Stephen Brown intended to do a second run of 2007’s satirical Yoga the Musical. Brown even had a sequel in mind from the onset. “If we didn’t get shot at or run off the stage the first time...

Theater | Flash and Trash: Local theater comedy comes in two very different forms

POSTED // Apr 30,2008 - The Producers There are some American musicals so thoroughly entertaining that it would take an act of gross incompetence to screw them up—The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Chicago. After just a handful of years, it feels as though The Producers...