Charlie Schill

It’s true confessions time! I really don’t care much for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I know, that’s practically heresy for anyone living in Utah, given Donny Osmond’s well-known connection to that show.

I’m embarrassed to admit that in three decades of living in northern Utah, I had never visited the Pickleville Playhouse in Garden City prior to last month.

Twelfth Night is the Shakespearian equivalent of the screwball comedies that Hollywood made during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Done right, the comedies of William Shakespeare are that hilarious and the Utah Shakespeare Festival knows how to do these shows right.

The Cache Theatre Company staged an amusing little amateur production of Frozen Jr. featuring talented teens from Cache Valley high schools last weekend.

Everyone knows that even bad Shakespeare is pretty good. But there’s no bad Shakespeare at the Utah Shakespeare Festival and their current production of Macbeth is the Bard at his best – lean and mean.

Now that our local summer theater season is over, there’s time for me to vent about one of my pet peeves – Disney musicals.

If you loved The Barber of Seville during the 2018 Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre season – and who didn’t? – make a beeline for the final performance of the current production of The Marriage of Figaro. It’s another great comic opera with the same hilarious characters, equally beautiful music, thrilling performances and gorgeous costuming.

If you don’t think that a 90-minute farce with a tiny cast can be as entertaining as a full-scale musical comedy, then you obviously haven’t seen the Lyric Repertory Company’s current production of Murder for Two.

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.