Theater Review: Chicago

Singing/dancing the bee's knees, acting flat

POSTED // Jul 10,2012 - Chicago is a show for folks who like their social commentary and media criticism to come with lots of singing and dancing.

Chapul Bars

An energy bar made of, yep, bugs

POSTED // Jun 26,2012 - Pat Crowley—founder and visionary of Chapul, a new company making energy bars in Salt Lake City—wants to feed you bugs.

Alpha Dominche

SLC's Steampunk coffee machine

POSTED // May 15,2012 - I appreciate good coffee, but I’ll also drink swill. Thank goodness for Khristian Bombeck. He is the inventor of the Steampunk, a new commercial coffee-brewing apparatus being manufactured here in Salt Lake City

Plan-B Theatre: The Scarlet Letter

Breathing life into the classic text

POSTED // Apr 17,2012 - There are certain advantages to adapting a literary classic like The Scarlet Letter, playing now at Plan-B Theatre Company—but there’s a lot of pressure, too.

WTC: Little Shop of Horrors

Comedic musical goes off without a hitch

POSTED // Apr 17,2012 - Sometimes a show is more than just good; it’s downright fun. Wasatch Theatre Company’s production of the classic treatise on botany, dentistry and the American Dream—Little Shop of Horrors—dares you not to leave humming and grinning.

Snider Bros. Meats

Local "euphemism-free" meat

POSTED // Apr 10,2012 - Set in the middle of a suburban strip mall at 6200 South and Highland Drive, Snider Bros. Meats isn’t exactly what comes to mind ...

Pioneer Theatre Company: Emma

More like an outline true adaptation

POSTED // Feb 28,2012 - The problem with Pioneer Theatre Company’s production of Emma—adapted from the Jane Austen novel by Jon Jory—is not with the cast ...

Yee-Haw Pickle Company

Tasty pickles from Park City

POSTED // Feb 21,2012 - Andrew Cesati of Park City’s Yee-Haw Pickle Company has me thinking about … well, about pickles.

Stockman's Steakhouse

Come for the steak, stay for the cake

POSTED // Feb 14,2012 - I have a pretty serious sweet tooth in general, but I’m a chocolate man when it comes right down to it. I’m sure your berry-cream-cornmeal-vanilla whatever is delicious, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s missing a necessary ingredient.

Em's

An under-the-radar neighborhood joint

POSTED // Jan 17,2012 - Em’s is a place that I just sort of forgot about for a while there. Housed in an old storefront ...

Cheese at Caputo's

Meet specialty-foods manager Matt Caputo

POSTED // Jan 9,2012 - Matt Caputo, manager of the specialty-foods-market side of Tony Caputo’s Market & Deli, was “born and bred into the specialty-foods industry.”

Stoneground

Quality eats, and not just pizza

POSTED // Dec 6,2011 - When it opened a little more than a decade ago, Stoneground was a revelation to me.

The Sunshine Boys

Pinnacle's quippy old men

POSTED // Nov 8,2011 - Pinnacle Acting Company’s new production of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys is a study in nostalgia as much as it is an exploration of comedy.

Duck Hunt

The search for duck commences

POSTED // Oct 25,2011 - I texted a good friend of mine, a professional chef who actually cooks at home: “Do you know where to get duck legs retail?”

Review: Pinnacle Acting Company's Proof

POSTED // May 5,2011 - Proof is about math—but don’t let that scare you. Though there is much talk of mathematics, there is no actual math knowledge required of the audience. It’s really about family ...

Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth

Three plays explore community, class and close relationships.

POSTED // Jan 25,2011 - The Talented Tenth is not your typical race-relations play. In fact, there’s no race relations at all, at least not directly.

David Fetzer's Theater Revolution

The New Works Theatre Machine is shaking up Salt Lake City.

POSTED // Nov 29,2010 - There’s a lot of theater to choose from in this town—but David Fetzer is afraid that there might not be any for you. He wants to change that ...

boom

Emotion in Motion: Humor, anger and heartbreak fuel three new theater productions.

POSTED // Nov 10,2010 - Boom is difficult to discuss without spoilers, but as its strength comes not from the specific plot events as much as the themes they represent, let’s see if I can avoid any big revelations.

The Utah Theater Scene

Salt Lake City plays pack a wallop.

POSTED // Jan 4,2010 - Live Utah theater isn’t going anywhere. Long a home to clowns, misfits and crowd-pleasing entertainers, the stage offers an intimate experience ...

Kreisel in the Kitchen

POSTED // Mar 11,2009 - It was while Adam Kreisel was studying architecture in Florence, Italy, that he discovered cooking. He enjoyed architecture, but disillusionment with the working environment led him to pursue a professional cooking career instead. Kreisel says he found architecture and cooking strangely similar in their mutual blending of art and science.

Taco Time

POSTED // Feb 19,2009 - Street tacos are the original Mexican fast food. Offerings typically consist of traditional family recipes for chicken, pork and beef served on small corn tortillas, fresh and warm off a greasy grill. Sure, there are variations, but the basics are the same.

Feeling Saucy

POSTED // Feb 9,2009 - Woody Allen once described Los Angeles as a city whose major cultural contribution was right turns on red lights. By that metric, Utah has SoCal beat: We have given the world fry sauce. Salmon-pink in color, it is the most efficient way to get additional fat onto the deep-fried potatoes next to a bacon cheeseburger.

Feeling Saucy

POSTED // Feb 4,2009 - Woody Allen once described Los Angeles as a city whose major cultural contribution was right turns on red lights. By that metric, Utah has SoCal beat: We have given the world fry sauce. nSalmon-pink in color, it is the most efficient way to get additional fat onto the deep-fried potatoes next to a bacon cheeseburger. Creating a new way to up Utahns’ fat intake was a tough assignment, but loc...

Theater | Six Up: Six Years revisits the lives of an American couple after the “good war.”

POSTED // Nov 26,2008 - In Six Years, now playing at Salt Lake Acting Company, Phil (Robert Scott Smith) has been gone fighting a war for a while. World War II, specifically. You know, the good one. He is obviously troubled when he finally returns home to his wife, Meredith (Alexandra Harbold). We revisit them over the coming decades—once every six years—and witness the far-reaching repercussions of his initi...

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 | Not Blown Away: One flawed performance blunts the thematic impact of Skin in Flames

POSTED // Feb 13,2008 - Sometimes, you just want a play to be better than it is. For its own sake, I mean. Sometimes, a production brings so much essential humanity to the stage in front of you, and touches on so many important themes that you want to forgive its incidental...

Theater | Poly Glut: The Foreigner’s hilarious comedy trips over its darker themes

POSTED // Dec 12,2007 - People talking funny are funny. Accents are funny. Malapropisms are funny. Most of all, people speaking foreign languages are funny. This is even more true when the language being spoken has been entirely invented for optimal humor. Pioneer Theatre Company’s...

Theater | Lost Boy: Our reviewer finds he may have outgrown some of the charms of Peter Pan

POSTED // Dec 5,2007 - Peter Pan is the summer blockbuster of musical theater. It has overwrought villains, stunning production values, cool special effects and a script that seems like an afterthought. It also has, most importantly, kids on wires flying around. That’s...

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...

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

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...

Broad Side

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

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...

Off-Broadway Bound

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

Spirited Away

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

Grief Stricken

Frustrating performances blunt the emotional force of Rabbit Hole.

Empire Waste

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

Relative Merits

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

The Pére Entrapped

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

24-Hour Artsy People

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