The Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre will reprise its triumphant 2015 production of ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ during its upcoming 2022 season.
LOGAN – The Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre has announced the line-up of attractions for its 2022 summer season.
That production schedule will include the opera The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice; the opera Carmen by Georges Bezet; the musical She Loves Me by Joe Masteroff, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick; the musical The Man of La Mancha by Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion; and the opera The Tender Land by Aaron Copeland and Horace Everett.
That schedule is as close as possible to the one that was originally planned for 2020, but was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to UFOMT managing director Gary Griffin.
“Carmen is replacing I Do! I Do! in the upcoming schedule,” Griffin explains, “because we did that show this year. Man of LaMancha is also new to the 2022 schedule as well as The Tender Land.”
All of those productions, except The Tender Land, will debut in downtown Logan between July 6 and 9. Those shows will then be staged in repertory through Aug. 6.
The Tender Land will be performed July 21 and 23 only.
The Magic Flute was Mozart’s last composition, debuting just two months before his untimely death in 1791. Told in both singing and spoken dialogue, the opera is a fantasy in which a prince struggles to rescue the daughter of the Queen of the Night from a high priest.
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was the first collaboration between Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice to be performed publicly. Although often regarded as the “puny little brother” of Jesus Christ Superstar, the musical comedy is wildly popular with Utah audiences due to the production’s long association with Donny Osmond.
The UFOMT last staged Joseph in the summer of 2013.
The French opera Carmen is among the most popular and frequently performed compositions in the operatic canon. It tells the story of a naïve soldier who is seduced by a fiery gypsy dancer. Its score includes the “Habanera” and “The Toreador Song,” two of the most familiar of operatic arias.
She Loves Me is a musical adaptation of a 1940 film entitled The Shop Around the Corner starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan. Its plot features two bickering employees of a perfume shop in Budapest who are unknowing romantically involved as pen pals after connecting through a lonely-hearts advertisement.
Man of La Mancha is a musical inspired by Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel Don Quoixote. The award-winning play centers on a fictional struggle by Cervantes to protect his manuscript from censorship and himself from execution by the Spanish Inquisition.
Man of Las Mancha was last performed by UFOMT actors in 2015.
The Tender Land is a relatively modern, English-language opera dramatizing the life of an American farm family in the Midwest. Originally intended for a television broadcast, the composition unsuccessfully debuted in 1954 at the New York City Opera and has since been extensively revived for acclaimed regional theater productions.
Griffin says that four of the upcoming UFOMT productions – The Magic Flute, Joseph, Carmen and Man of La Mancha – will be presented at the Ellen Eccles Theatre in downtown Logan.
She Loves Me will be staged at the Utah Theatre on Center Street.
Finally, The Tender Land will be performed in an outdoor setting at Griffin’s family farm in Millville.