The Lyric Repertory Company here has announced a slate of resident and guest directors to guide its productions during the upcoming 2024 season.
LOGAN – The Lyric Repertory Company has announced its slate of resident and guest directors for its 2024 season.
The Lyric season will lead off with the musical review Sh-Boom! Life Could be a Dream, headed by guest director Kitty Balay. Ms. Balay is the director of engagement and a resident artist at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, CA. She is an actor, director and dialect coach whose previous experience includes more than 80 productions at PCPA, several other West Coast theatres and the Utah Shakespeare Festival.
Sh-Boom! Life Could Be a Dream is the follow-up to playwright Roger Bean’s The Marvelous Wonderettes, which was the surprise hit of the Lyric’s 2023 season.
Paul Mitri, the chair of the Performing Arts Department at Utah State University, will direct the Noel Coward comedy Hay Fever. Mitri is well-known to local audiences for his staging of a brilliant reimagining of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night during the Lyric’s last season.
A veteran actor, director and choreographer, Mitir joined the Lyric company as its artistic producer in January of 2021. He arrived here in Logan after a 15-year stint as a theater professor and department chairman at the University of Hawaii in Manoa,
Mitri is expected to breath new life into Hay Fever, a cross between high farce and a comedy of manners written by the inimitable Coward in 1924.
The heartfelt comedy/drama Driving Miss Daisy will be headed by returning guest director Summer S. Session. Ms. Session’s talents as a director were on display during the Lyric’s in 2021 season, when she supervised The Thanksgiving Play, a hilarious satire of Woke politics, and assisted on the small-cast productions of The Mountaintop and Dreaming American.
Driving Miss Daisy, a 1988 Pulitzer Prize winner by playwright Alfred Uhry, is part of his “Atlanta Trilogy,” dealing with Jewish families in the South during the first half of the 20th Century.
USU theatre professor Michael Shipley will undertake probably the most challenging offering of the Lyric 2024 season with Shear Madness, an interactive whodunit and one of the longest-running non-musical plays in theater history. In addition to his teaching credits, Shipley is also an actor, director and dialect coach who has performed and coached at regional theatres across the county, including the Utah Shakespeare Festival, the American Players Theatre, the Great River Shakespeare Festival and the American Conservatory Theatre.
Combining aspects of a mystery, a farce and a rollicking party in a hair salon, Shear Madness gets its audience into-the-act as murder investigators questioning the suspect actors. Much of the dialogue is improvised by the actors and the play’s ending is whatever the audience decides.
Finally, local audience favorite Herb Newsome is returning to direct the Lyric’s fifth annual InterACT presentation. Newsome is a gifted actor, playwright and set designer who exploded onto Cache Valley’s stages in 2022. He stole the show with winning performances in Fox on the Fairway and Fences that year and returned to a starring role in Twelfth Night in 2023. Newsome also demonstrated his amazing versatility in his one-man shows Freeman in Paris (2022) and Break It Down (2023).
As usual, the InterACT series will highlight new plays by up-and-coming playwrights, then give audience members the opportunity to stick around after the show to share their thoughts and offer feedback.
The Lyric Repertory Company’s 2024 season will kick off in June.