LOGAN – The Lyric Repertory Company ushered in its 60th anniversary season on June 1 by tossing the rulebook on its introductory Page-to-Stage events straight out the window.
Lyric artistic director Rich Call appropriately made that announcement to an audience of mostly summer citizens standing under the glare of the new stage lights of the restored Caine Lyric Theatre in downtown Logan.
Call and others on the stage all wore blue tee-shirts celebrating the company’s 60th anniversary, while the back of those garments displayed a list of the titles of six decades of previous productions in chronological order – and very small print.
While the tickets for the Monday event promised a meeting with the company’s administrative team, Call instead assembled the entire cast and crew of the upcoming production of Forever Plaid for a lively question and answer session with future audience members.
In upcoming Page-to-Stage sessions on June 2 through June 5, Call said the Lyric troupe will introduce its teams of performers and backstage crews who will present the musicals Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Come From Away and Guttenberg! as well as the comedic farce The Outsider.
The big news was, however, the summer citizens’ first peek at the theatre’s newly restored stage house.
Although the Caine Lyric’s seating area was untouched, the theatre’s entire structure from its proscenium arch to its back wall has undergone a more than $5 million restoration in the past year. That work including shoring up the foundations and structure of the stage house, raising its roof, installing a new theatrical fly systems and rebuilding portions of the stage.
“What we’ve got now is an vintage Model-T theatre, with a brand-new Ferrari engine backstage,” according to lighting and sound designer Bruce Duerden, proudly showing off the state-of-the-art fly system that can now support both lights and sets above the stage.
The first use of that equipment will be during the debut of Forever Plaid on June 12, a musical that’s a particular favorite of Lyric Repertory audiences. In fact, Duerden recalls, this will be the fourth production of that nostalgic juke box musical by the Lyric company in recent memory.
Forever Plaid has also been performed by local community theatre groups in recent years, usually with veteran – if not age-appropriate — vocalists.
For the Lyric company’s production, however, director Call has assembly a cast of youngsters drawn from the ranks of Utah State University students.
Forever Plaid is a tribute to the clean-cut, close-harmony guy groups that dominated America’s radio airwaves prior to the game-changing British Invasion of the 1960s. Originally performed off-Broadway, the show resurrects ghostly high-school chums who return from the afterlife for the farewell concert they never got the chance to perform.
The cast of the upcoming production of Forever Plaid will include Grayson Jenkins, Riley Kyle Thompson, Graydee Noyes and Kaito Davis.
That ensemble will breathe life and four-part harmony into mostly forgotten pop music hits of the 1950’s like “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “No, Not Much,” “Rags to Riches,” “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing” and many others.
The Caine Lyric Theatre is located at 28 West Center Street in downtown Logan.