QSaltLake - Feature Story: Spring Arts Guide: Musical Theatre

Spring Arts Guide

Musical Theatre

Ah, the chorus boys. They’ll be out en-masse on stages all over Utah this year, most notably filling out the casts of productions by two high profile arts organizations. Park City’s Egyptian Theatre Company will present the gender-bending camp classic La Cage aux Folles, which features a bevy of chorus girls with rather prominent Adam’s apples, and the Utah Men’s Choir will mount an all-male staging of Salt Lake’s favorite musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
The two shows, which open on the same night, will make for a uniquely strong gay presence on Utah stages this upcoming season. And both will seek to raise the bar for quality in Wasatch Front shows.

Egyptian Theatre.
Dana Keiter, Artistic Director of the Egyptian, can’t wait to get La Cage on stage. The company had enormous success a few seasons ago with Pageant, another cross-dressing comedy, and has been fielding requests for revivals ever since. This year, with shows like the current staging of Jesus Christ Superstar, the company has moved into an era of larger, more professional-looking and sounding shows. Rather than repeat the usual summer season format of two shows in repertory, Keiter and company elected to pool resources for one large-scale musical. They saw La Cage as the perfect way to combine audiences’ desire for more men-in-drag comedy with the company’s focus on higher production values.
La Cage aux Folles, with a score by Jerry Herman, one of the Great White Way’s most celebrated tunesmiths, is a stage version of a French film better known to contemporary audiences from the 1996 American remake, The Birdcage, which starred Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. It tells the story of drag artist ZaZa and his partner Georges, who runs a Saint Tropez nightclub. Their son, Jean-Michel, brings his fiancée and future in-laws home to meet the parents, and ZaZa, in an effort not to offend the conservative sensibilities of the fiancée’s parents, must pretend to be the boy’s mother rather than the more flamboyant of his two fathers. As Keiter says, “I just adore the story. The Birdcage is one of those movies that you never tire of—whenever it’s on cable, you just have to stop and watch it.”
The stage version, which opens June 24 and runs through August 27 at the company’s Park City theatre, features nonstop slapstick comedy and grand production numbers in the traditional style, most of which feature a chorus of very attractive young men. The Egyptian’s version will be helmed by Brent Schneider, a modern dance professor at the University of Utah. Schneider is also one of the state’s most acclaimed directors and choreographers. Keiter points out that a mounting of La Cage is especially timely, as a Broadway revival opened in December; she sees her production as a means of providing Utah audiences a top-notch production of the show without the expense of a plane ticket.

Salt Lake Men’s Choir.
While the Egyptian is going gay for the summer, one of Utah’s most established gay organizations is coming out all over again—onto the stage.
“This is the largest assemblage of all-male talent ever on stage in Salt Lake,” says Lane Cheney proudly. “And I’m not kidding.”
Cheney, music director of the Salt Lake Men’s Choir, is talking about the group’s upcoming production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, set for June 24-26 at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in downtown Salt Lake. The show is a first of it’s kind for the celebrated choir, whose past performances have taken them everywhere from the Opera House in Sydney, Australia to the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Cheney and his collaborator, stage director and choreographer Jonathan Stowers, couldn’t be more excited about the group’s first fully-fledged stage production.
Deamcoat tells the story of Joseph, eldest son of Jacob (known to some as Israel) and his eleven brothers. The other siblings, jealous of Jacob’s attention to his acknowledged favorite, sell him into slavery in Egypt. Joseph suffers greatly, even landing in prison, but eventually rises to become the Pharaoh’s right hand man. He is given the chance to exact revenge on his brothers, but instead forgives them. Such a story has special meaning to men and women in the gay community, says Cheney, who believes that people who’ve been estranged from their own families as a result of their homosexuality will find that the story has particular resonance. “This is a show about a family that reconciles after doing heinous things to one another. Who better to tell it than gay men?”
While the show is inherently campy and silly, Cheney maintains that it nonetheless features some stunning moments that are often overlooked in overblown, “schmaltzy” productions. But he promises that this Joseph will be different: most stagings, he says, “run to caricature with no character… [we] will let the funny stuff be funny and the moving parts be moving.” This means that, while the show will have the audience “rolling in the aisles,” the humor will be reined in enough that Joseph’s reunion with his beloved father at the show’s climax will have real emotional meaning and won’t be relegated to afterthought status, as in most versions.
The production will also look and feel different from a typical Utah-style Joseph. Stowers has extensive experience in modern dance, and Cheney promises that the movement in the show will be “stunning.” Indeed, the collaboration was one of the project’s chief attractions for Cheney, who says Stowers is “a brilliant artist.” Further, Stowers lends a unique perspective to what has become Utah’s most ubiquitous summer theatre title, having directed the very first production in the Beehive State more than twenty years ago.
The sound will also be exceptional—the show will be staged in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner, the complex’s smallest venue, so the choral sounds will be rich and powerful. To keep from overwhelming performers and audiences, the score will be performed by six hands on two pianos, collectively covering the entire orchestral score.
As Cheney points out, the all-male casting idea may sound innovative to Utah audiences, but is actually a return to Lloyd Webber’s original vision of the piece. As originally conceived, the show was a half-hour retelling of the Genesis story, scored in pastiche and parody, written to be performed by boys’ choirs in English schools. The original New York and London productions were also all-male.
The two shows, the first a riotously funny take on gay domesticity and the other a familiar, riotously funny story staged in an unfamiliar context, share a common element—the importance of family, in all its diverse glory. With all the bile leveled at the gay community over the past year, seeing members of our collective family onstage, bold and beautiful, will be an empowering and emotional experience. Thanks to these productions, the summer theatre season will be tantalizing, provocative, heartwarming, and vastly entertaining.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat:
June 24-26, 7:30PM. Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 168 W. Broadway. Tickets at 355-2787 or Arttix.org • saltlakemenschoir.org

La Cage aux Folles:
Opens June 24, Wednesdays through Saturdays until August 27, 8:00PM. Egyptian Theatre Company, 328 Main Street, Park City. Tickets at 435-649-9371 or egyptiantheatrecompany.org.

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