LOGAN – The Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre has announced its line-up of offerings for the 2027 season.
For local audience members and summer citizens, the next UFOMT season will feature the opera Pagliacci and the musicals Fiddler on the Roof, The Wizard of Oz, Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Musical and Lend Me a Tenor the Musical.
Consisting of a famous prologue and two acts, Pagliacci is an Italian opera with music and libretto by Ruggero Leoncavallo. The popular opera tells the tragic story of Canio, actor and leader of a commedia dell’arte theatrical company. Betrayed by his faithless wife Nedda, Canio murders her and her lover Silvio on stage during a performance.
Fiddler on the Roof is a musical composed by Jerry Bock, with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. The story centers on Tevye, a milkman in the fictional village of Anatevka, who attempts to maintain his Jewish traditions as outside influences encroach upon his family’s lives.
He must cope with the strong-willed actions of his three older daughters who wish to marry for love and their choices of husbands are successively less palatable for Tevye.
As he has done previously, it’s expected that UFOMT impresario Michael Ballam will perform the role of Tevye.
Based on the 1939 film of the same name, The Wizard of Oz is a musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
The stage adaptation uses Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg songs from the film, plus new material added by the composing team of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Time Rice.
Tenderly is a musical based on the life of singer and actress Rosemary Clooney, who was recognized as one of America’s top female entertainers in the 1950s.
Ms. Clooney’s career languished in the 1960s, however, when the singer struggled with bipolar disorder.
Tenderly tells Ms. Clooney’s story through the lens of her therapy sessions, weaving between memories, flashbacks and the timeless songs that made her a star. With just two performers on stage, one actor plays the singer while the other transforms into more than a dozen characters, from her psychiatrist to Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, José Ferrer and members of her singer’s family.
Lend Me a Tenor is a musical by the composing team of Peter Sham and Brad Carroll based on the 1986 farce by playwright Ken Ludwig.
The musical adaptation was originally developed as a staged reading by the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2006, followed by a full-scale production of the show to rave reviews in 2007.
Although Ludwig’s original farce has been produced locally, l Lend Me a Tenor the Musical includes major plot revisions. The most notable of those changes being that the opera in the show has been changed from Otello to Pagliacci, resulting in three commedia dell’arte clowns adding to the musical’s confusion.
The 2027 Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre season will be one to remember, its organizers say, with professional artists from all over the county appearing on local stages.