Theater | Spoil & Trouble: Billion Dollar Baby pulls its jabs at over-indulgent parenting.

POSTED // Nov 21,2007 - There is no boxing in Billion Dollar Baby, the one-woman play by Julie Jensen making its world premiere this month at Salt Lake Acting Company. It is not a sequel or a parody of the 2004 film of similar name. Clint Eastwood is not associated with the...

Arts & Entertainment

Theater | Now stepping into The Batting Cage: One performance strikeout, and one home run.

By Rob Tennant

POSTED // Oct 17,2007 - Pygmalion Productions’ staging of Joan Ackermann’s The Batting Cage is about sisters—drastically different sisters with little in common. The gulf between them has only been widened by the grief they feel for their recently deceased...

Arts & Entertainment

Broad Side

Theater: The spoof humor of Desert Star’s Spamlet must be somebody else’s scene.

By Rob Tennant

POSTED // Sep 5,2007 - The lobby of the Desert Star Playhouse is made to look like the miniature Main Street of an idealized Old West town. Log-hewn storefronts lead to the theater. To the right is the racket of a commercial kitchen and the smell of pizza. I’m here to...

Arts & Entertainment

Off-Broadway Bound

Plan-B Theatre Company takes a fine-tuned Facing East to New York.

By Rob Tennant

POSTED // Jun 22,2007 - New York is a tough town. Ask any of your friends who moved out for a year or three before getting spit all the way back over the Rockies. The city has a way of expelling the weak. nnNo wonder the cast and crew of Plan-B Theatre Company’s Facing...

Arts & Entertainment

Spirited Away

A little lubrication could aid in the enjoyment of Saturday’s Voyeur 2007.

By Rob Tennant

POSTED // Jun 22,2007 - Salt Lake Acting Company’s perennial Saturday’s Voyeur isn’t so much a piece of musical theater as it is a party, and I’m the guy who forgot to bring booze. The front page of SaltLakeActingCompany.org clearly read “BYO food...

Arts & Entertainment

Grief Stricken

Frustrating performances blunt the emotional force of Rabbit Hole.

By Rob Tennant

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - There were a few tears in Salt Lake Acting Company’s main theater the night I saw Rabbit Hole, but not from me. I saw where it was supposed to be heart wrenching, but I just didn’t buy it. The tale of a family dealing with the tragic death...

Arts & Entertainment

Empire Waste

Pioneer Theatre Company’s Pride and Prejudice delivers Austen without the teeth.

By Rob Tennant

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Oh, how I long for the days of formal manners, unchallenged patriarchy and the ever-so-delightful empire waist. Pride and Prejudice delivers all these quaint trappings and much of the humor of Jane Austen’s classic novel, but misses its subversive...

Arts & Entertainment

Relative Merits

Lost in Yonkers deftly explores the loving families that drive us crazy.

By Rob Tennant

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Life is funny. It is also tragic and lonely. Usually at the roots of this humor, tragedy and loneliness are your family members, whom you would kill if only you didn’t love them so much. Neil Simon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Lost in Yonkers...

Arts & Entertainment

The Pére Entrapped

Sexsting never quite explains the family man behind an online sexual predator.

By Rob Tennant

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - John Doe (Paul Kiernan) is exactly the Everyman his name suggests. He is a good-hearted, hard-working schlub with the alienated family we expect from a contemporary fictionalized suburbanite. Oh, and he also likes to chat explicitly with underage girls...

Arts & Entertainment

24-Hour Artsy People

The overnight gestation'and labor pains'of Slam’s brand-new plays.

By Rob Tennant

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - It’s around 5:15 on Saturday afternoon, and the cast of Plan-B is struggling through their tech rehearsal on the stage of the Black Box Theatre at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center. They are just one group participating in Plan-B Theatre Company’s...