Utah Theatre articles published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including theatre reviews, interviews with playwrights, directors, actors and more.
Allen Smith’s set for Annie Baker’s play Body Awareness at Pygmalion Theater is a kitchen and a bedroom — as Ikea-perfect as a dollhouse. There is something so orderly about the kitchen it’s startling; it ‘s too precious to be real. It seems it’s still a drawing on […]
Let’s say you’re a single, 45-year-old woman in a religion where people marry young and procreate often. Now you’re about to age out of your LDS “mid-singles” ward, and on top of that you’re still haunted by an earthquake that compounded the isolation you felt during a global […]
“What a tremendously hostile world a rat must endure. Yet not only does he survive, he thrives. And the reason for this is because our little foe has an instinct for survival and preservation second to none. And that, Monsieur, is what a Jew shares with a rat.” […]
Why would a writer like Harvey Fierstein, author of plays like Torchsong Trilogy, La Cage aux Folles, and Kinky Boots, write a one-woman show about the New York politician Bella Abzug? Look at when it was written: 2016, the year Trump was elected president. Fierstein was influenced, he […]
Playwright Alexandra Petri, a Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, a Washington Post columnist and a humorist (author of A Field Guide to Awkward Silences, New American Library, 2016), must have wanted to gather misery like a bouquet. So she gives us — and in some ways it seems […]
In fair Cedar, where we lay our scene, there is now fully an entire block that is made to conjure up the Bard. You can’t, in truth, escape him. From late June until early October the Utah Shakespeare Festival presents “life-affirming classic and contemporary plays in repertory, with […]
Internationally celebrated playwright Catherine Filloux has always had a penchant for traveling to haunted places filled with hunted people and then writing eloquently about their plight so that the rest of us can wake up to what is really going on in our world. White Savior, the play she is […]
The world premiere of playwright Jenny Kokai’s and director Jason Bowcutt’s Singing to the Brine Shrimp (at Plan-B Theatre through February 23) gives the Salt Lake City public a funny and insightful look at belonging, culture shock, and silliness in the art world (for more about the play, […]
Brilliantly acted, (just a couple of second-night hiccups on Saturday) and beautifully directed by Teresa Sanderson, Pygmalion’s Flying by Sheila Cowley in the Rose Wagner’s Blackbox Theatre was a finalist at several festivals and has a lot going for it thematically (if people would stop bringing up the […]
Politics and religion are topics to avoid during polite conversation, but today, most would also add marriage to the list. Before the middle of the last century, marriage was an assumed part of life after a certain age, but now, depending on your generation, there’s a broad spectrum […]
Whether you’re a Utah native traveling abroad or a happy transplant trying to explain the subtle but omnipresent cultural quirks of the state, it sometimes feels like the rest of the country is glad to be totally ignorant about Utah. Playwright Jenny Kokai’s Singing to the Brine Shrimp […]
Friends hoped Fred Adams would go on forever. Not in order to keep having grandiose ideas like that of founding a world-class Shakespearean festival in the middle of the Utah desert (and then bringing that dream to fruition in a big, Tony- and Emmy-award-winning way), but just to […]
At the conclusion of Julie Jensen’s wrenching, two-person play Two-Headed on Sunday afternoon at the Rose Wagner, my companion wept while describing the scars an event like the massacre at Mountain Meadow can leave on people’s souls; this writer pondered plural marriage and how it was so vividly portrayed here […]
“Silent Dancer,” a Jazz Age romance “play with dance” that includes Gatling guns, snazzy costumes and jewelry, gangsters, and gaga shoes for cast members of all persuasions opens April 10 at Salt Lake Acting Company and really should be the Talk of the Town by now — perhaps […]
Daisy Blake has waited 15 years for this role. It’s not an iconic one — Lady Macbeth or Blanche DuBois — nor even a lead; but it’s one she says is on her theatrical bucket list, the one she has chosen to embrace after a 5-year absence from […]
There’s nothing funny about depression — ‘tis the season for an onslaught of the crippling mental illness in Utah, a state whose residents statistically are particularly prone to it. (Perhaps it’s more prevalent here during Pride than Yuletide?) That said, Pygmalion Productions is presenting an adult contemporary comedy […]
Utah’s Plan-B Theatre is set to debut playwright Matthew Greene’s newest work, “Good Standing,” in just a few weeks at the Rose Wagner. The play presents an intriguing perspective of a meaningful and complex issue, with a single actor, Austin Archer, representing multiple roles within a disciplinary council […]
It may not look like a skydive in the still photographs, but in the Rose Wagner it feels real enough that you easily buy into several jumps in their entirety — preceded as they are by the rich sounds of plane vibrations and actors seeming to shake right […]
Taking place on a set with almost 20 clocks, Jenifer Nii’s “The Weird Play” has the calculus, the mind-numbingness of geometry. The set, by Halee Rasmussen, contains the gaping hollows of one actual door-opening and one window-opening, opening into the darkness of the Plan-B Theatre backstage, itself clearly […]
