LOGAN – Looking back at the recently completed 2025 season of the Lyric Repertory Company, Artistic Director Richie Call feels justified in pronouncing it “a great summer.”
“There’s several different ways to measure a summer season,” Call explains. “Sometimes we feel like we achieved something important artistically. Sometimes we have a really successful season financially. Sometimes your company just seems to fit together like a real family.”
In 2025, Call says that the Lyric achieved all three of those ideal goals.
“That’s what we hope for every year,” he adds. “But you can never really plan on that.”
Based out of the Theatre Arts Program at Utah State University, the Lyric troupe certainly didn’t anticipate selling record numbers of tickets in 2025, but that’s what happened.
In an average year, Lyric musicals typically gross between $30,000 and $40,000 in revenue, while non-musicals make between $15,000 and $20,000.
“By the time that we opened Bright Star this season, we had already sold a record number of tickets,” Call says with a sly grin. “By the end of the first week of that musical’s run, thanks to word of mouth, ticket sales had exploded through the roof. Bright Star ended up bringing in $60,000, almost doubling what the juke musicals The Marvelous Wonderettes and Sh-Boom did in previous years.”
Call attributes that success to the fact that the Steve Martin/ Edie Bricknell bluegrass musical obviously struck a chord with summer citizens and local audiences. He also credits first-time director Eric Van Tielen for delivering an excellent show and the amazing performance by the sizzling Kelsey Crotz in the role of backwoods literary prodigy Alice Murphy.
Call acknowledges that the Lyric musical also benefited from the Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre being on hiatus in 2025.
“But I also think that a lot of people, rather than buying a season pass for the Lyric or the Festival Opera, are now waiting to hear what the big shows are in the summer and are shopping for the best entertainment,” he observes.
With Bright Star paving the way, the Lyric’s 2025 non-musicals also did a boom business in terms of tickets sales, almost doubling the profits that typical non-musicals had achieved in previous seasons.
The Lyric Repertory Company has been slowly rebuilding since 2020, when university COVID restrictions precluded mounting a live season. Audience numbers finally returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2024 and the company hopes to build on its 2025 success in the next year.
“Next year will be our 60th anniversary season,” Call emphasizes. “We’ll be back in the Caine Lyric Theatre downtown, which was closed this year for renovations. We’ll also be opening with Forever Plaid, a nostalgic small-cast musical that’s an audience favorite.”
Other offerings in the Lyric’s 2026 season will be the musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, directed by Vanessa Ballam; the Harry Potter spin-off Puffs; Gutenberg, the Musical!, starring Call and fellow USU instructor Stephan Espinosa; and the Noël Coward comedy Blithe Spirit.