Charlie Schill

The Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre launched its 2019 main-stage offerings with a rousing production of Newsies, an old-fashioned, crowd-pleasing musical.

When performing one of the greatest works in the whole canon of American musical theater, the quality bar is naturally set sky-high. The Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre’s ongoing production of the classic West Side Story easily vaults that bar and continues into the heavens.

In a surprisingly gutsy move, the Lyric Repertory Company has played the high-voltage drama card again in its 2019 season. The Lyric’s trademark is feel-good comedies and small-cast musicals, after all. But the company’s artistic directors Richie Call and Jason Spelbring have assembled a group of performers who represent a high-water mark of talent this year. So why not go for broke?

If you haven’t been living on Mars for the past two decades, then you know that Mama Mia! is a juke box musical featuring the eclectic music of the Swedish pop group ABBA.

Any good theater production can make you laugh or cry. But only a truly great show has the power to frighten you. The scary thing about the Lyric Repertory Company’s ongoing production of A Raisin in the Sun is the realization that this drama is as relevant in our supposedly post-racial 21st Century as it was when Lorraine Hansberry penned the script 60 years ago. The topics may have changed when we discuss race and family relations nowadays, but the issues have not.

The Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre’s fireworks will begin right after the 4th of July this year. That’s appropriate because festival impresario Michael Ballam has surprises in store for all of us in the weeks ahead.

The start of Cache Valley’s local theater season is just a couple weeks away. For the Lyric Repertory Company, according to artistic director Richie Call, the big news is six hot shows in three cool venues. The Lyric is staging six shows this year, rather than its traditional four, by moving three of those productions into theaters on the Utah State University campus.