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Broadway way, way west: high energy, sassy, even irreverent, Salt Lake City's performing arts scene is rooted in tradition - Travel & Recreation

Sunset, March, 2003 by Lora J. Finnegan

The music swells and stage lights come up on a backdrop of red rock cliffs and a small town. The characters begin to sing--about beehive hairdos, beauty pageants, federal land policies ("This Land Is My Land, This Land Ain't Your Land"), and helicopter attacks by United Nations forces.

This satire of paranoid Middle America wouldn't be a surprise in, say, New York. Heck, you'd almost expect it. But this performance is way west of Broadway. It's in Salt Lake City's Marmalade Hills Center, an old Mormon ward house--turned-theater near Capitol Hill, and the show is Saturday's Voyeur, an offbeat, sharp-witted musical presented annually by the Salt Lake Acting Company. With a different script each year, Voyeur is wildly popular because it pokes fun at just about everything sacred to life and culture in Salt Lake City and Utah.

"Our job is to offend everybody," says writer-director Allen Nevins. "And we're quite good at it," he adds with a laugh. According to writer-director Nancy Borgenicht, "This play is as popular here as the Nutcracker is in other towns." All of which says a lot about how this community supports performances of all kinds.

Despite popular perception, the arts scene in Salt Lake City doesn't begin and end with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Over postproduction coffees in the playhouse basement, Borgenicht and Nevins paint a picture of a vibrant arts landscape. "As a city, we're geographically isolated," notes Borgenicht, a touslehaired Salt Lake native. "But that means theater, symphony, and opera are all even more important."

Classy theaters for a variety of productions

Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, the city's newest addition, has a state-of-the-art dance stage and sound system for its 500-seat auditorium. With two additional small performance spaces and rehearsal studios, the center provides more venues for dance, music, and theater.

The king of Salt Lake City's cultural scene, however, is the Maurice Abravanel Hall, home to the Utah Symphony and nationally recognized for its acoustics. "It's designed solely for a symphony orchestra," explains Larry Zalkind, the symphony's principal trombone. "And no matter where you sit, the acoustics are great." His proof? "If a hall isn't well balanced," Zalkind notes, "when the brass plays soft, the audience in the very back row of the hail won't hear you. In Abravanel, they can hear every soft horn note in the back row--so your technique better be clean."

In March and beyond, you can sample a smorgasbord of performing arts, from the eye-catching choreography of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company at the Rose Wagner to a popular ballet at the Capitol Theatre. Attend symphony classics at Abravanel Hall or the Salt Lake Acting Company's cutting-edge plays in the Marmalade Hills Center.

Supporting the arts

To grasp the significance of the arts in local life, it helps to remember that Salt Lake is called the City of the Saints for its ties to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). Charles Morey, patrician artistic director of the Pioneer Theatre Company, explains that "the church is very open to and supportive of music, dance, and theater--it's part of their tradition." One of Salt Lake's earliest important buildings was the Tabernacle, a massive 1867 temple to music that now houses the 360-voice Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The Utah Symphony & Opera travels to schools throughout the state, performing for more than 70,000 students each year.

One result is a highly appreciative and even discriminating audience. Trombonist Zalkind knows this is true for symphony performances. "A guy in the grocery store asked what I thought of the second movement of the Bruckner the previous night--then told me what he thought," Zalkind says with a laugh. "I guess I shouldn't have been surprised--in Salt Lake, audiences know their stuff".