LOGAN — While anticipation is building for the Lyric Repertory Company’s current season, the performing arts troupe has already announced its play selections for 2025.
That announcement came during the Sh-Bash, a gala launch party for the Lyric’s current season held June 8 at the Logan Golf and County Club.
The members of the company’s artistic staff took turns at the microphone, each teasing the audience with one future play selection. They were Dr. Nick Morrison, executive producer of the Lyric and dean of the Caine College of Arts at Utah State University; Leslie Brott, also an executive producer; Richie Call, the company’s artistic director; and Dennis Hassan, an associate artistic director.
The gathering of mostly summer citizens applauded the slightly premature news that the Lyric plans to produce four plays in 2025 – the bluegrass musical Bright Star; the mystery Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure; an odd little British comedy Home, I’m Darling; and the classic comedy of manners The Importance of Being Ernest.
Bright Star is a southern Gothic musical written and composed by comedian Steve Martin and Edie Bricknell, recounting the incredible true story of the Iron Mountain Baby. The play is set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in 1945-46, with flashbacks to a tragic romance in 1923.
To celebrate that selection, musical numbers from Bright Star were performed by the cast members and artistic team of this year’s musical Sh-Boom – Life Could Be a Dream.
They were director Kitty Balay, who sang a rousing rendition of the theme “If You Knew My Story;” Brett Terrell and Ari Whatcott sharing a romantic but still thoroughly bluegrass duet; and Jon Kaplan performed the show’s anthem “Bright Star.”
The musical is familiar to local audiences, having been produced by the Cache Theatre Company in 2019 and in a concert format by Music Theatre West in 2020. The marvelous Lindsey Kelstrom starred in both those productions as Alice Murphy, the backwoods literary prodigy at the center of Bright Star.
The musical closed on Broadway after 30 previews and 100 performances in 2016, despite financial support from its writer/composer team and occasional stage appearances by Steve Martin. Since then, however, Bright Star has become a popular choice for production in regional and community theater circles.
Ms. Brott previewed the American mystery Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure, a stage adaptation by Steven Dietz of two short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – A Scandal in Bohemia and Reichenbach Falls (aka The Final Solution).
With his career as a consulting detective seemingly behind him, Holmes is tempted out of retirement by a case too juicy to ignore, particularly when it involves an old flame.
Chasing a photo being used to blackmail the King of Bohemia, Holmes is joined by the faithful Dr. Watson in a pursuit that quickly leads him to sordid territory involving the famous opera star Irene Adler and his old nemesis Prof. James Moriarty, the infamous “Napolean of Crime.”
Then Richie Call announced the selection of Home, I’m Darling, a quirky English comedy coming straight from the West End theatre district in London. That play explores the near perfect – but somewhat unconventional – marriage of Judy and Johnny.
They’re an average couple, except that Judy has chosen to live in a fantasy world of the 1950s, surrounding herself with the lifestyle, clothes, décor and appliances of that bygone era.
For the sake of their marital bliss, Johnny goes along with the charade, until problems at work threaten the whole fabric of their unreality.
Then Judy and Johnny will have to hilariously tackle all the modern issues of gender politics, feminism and relationships that suddenly intrude on their 1950’s style “perfect” marriage.
The Lyric Repertory is the first theater company in America to obtain the rights to produce Home, I’m Darling, Richie Call bragged.
Finally, Hassan announced the selection of the classic satire of late Victorian conformity, The Importance of Being Ernest.
The 1895 high farce with witty dialogue displays the talents of playwright Oscar Wilde at the top of his form, before his career was prematurely ended by revelations about what was then considered to be his outrageous lifestyle.
Subtitled “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” the play lampoons its supposedly strait-laced characters’ efforts to maintain elaborate facades to escape their burdensome social obligations, including marriage.
For more than 100 years, theater critics have vainly searched for a moral in Wilde’s most famous work, without much success.
As usual, the Lyric Repertory Company’s 2025 season will also include the sixth season of its work-in progress InterACT series as well as Vosco Call Spotlight events highlighting outstanding contributors to the Cache Valley theater community.