Theater

The opening night audience at Eccles Theater was restive but eager on May 30th. It had been less than a week since Tina Turner’s death (May 24, 2023), and we awaited a reprise of her life in tonight’s sold-out performance of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.

The lights went up, the show began. Tina sat center stage, her back to the audience as the ensemble cast emerged from the wings to signal the start of a journey of one of music’s most memorable stars.

Appearing first onstage as a pesky child (played by the astonishing Ayvah Johnson), little Anna Mae Bullock’s spirited defiance could not be contained within the confines of Nutbush, Tennessee nor of her violence-ridden home. Wearily, her mother Zelma (an affecting Roz White) and Anna Mae’s sister Aline (Parris Lewis) fled, leaving Anna Mae finally in the care of her sympathetic Gran (played by Carla R. Stewart).

Pulitzer-winning playwright Katori Hall, along with writers Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins, helmed the book. Act one laid the foundation for Anna Mae’s emergence as a talent when, once discovered by Ike Turner, found moderate success in the music they generated as partners in the Ike Turner Revue.

But a smooth path to stardom was not assured, as Ike’s penchant for power surged through his fists, and his ever-tightening control descended into a reign of violent rage and sexual betrayal.

As Ike’s violence grew, Tina Turner’s love grew. Her love for Raymond (played by Gerard M. Williams) the group’s saxophonist. In the show’s standout duet, Tina and Raymond seamlessly meld the haunting refrains of “Let’s Stay Together,” in pulsating falsettos of love and despair. When Ike discovered their affair, Raymond was driven out, leaving Tina pregnant with their child.

Not even marriage to Tina tamed the rapacious Ike, made even starker when Phil Spector who records with them is besotted by Tina’s rendition of “River Deep – Mountain High.” Tina’s surge toward freedom is palpable. In a formidable act of sisterhood, one of Ike’s blond conquests, Rhonda (played by Lael Van Keuren), befriends Tina, finally becoming her erstwhile manager throughout Tina’s journey.

After a siege of bloody beatings and a suicide attempt, Tina Turner fights back and runs off, ending Act One in a hotel, with no money, singing “I Don’t Wanna Fight No More.” Act Two brought a tectonic shift in tone and temper in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.

It was here, it was now, that the stage exploded with Tina’s transcendence into a vaunted solo artist. Bruno Poet’s lighting design and Mark Thompson’s set design, emblazoned in graphic undulating projections, heightened the play’s temperature. And Nicholas Skilbeck’s music direction found its exhilarating tone in what was Tina Turner’s unforgettable oeuvre.

But it was the standout, electrifying performance of Naomi Rodgers as Tina Turner that left the audience breathless. She was the Tina Turner we’d been waiting to see.  Tina’s journey as a solo artist began with a new manager, Australian Roger Davies (played by Zachary Freier-Harrison), and a trip to London to explore new music spurred by the advent of computer-aided Rock ’n Roll. Here she meets German marketing executive Erwin Bach, the man she will later marry (and live with the remainder of her life in a small Swiss town outside Zurich).

Confounded by the new wave of computerized music, Tina returned to New York, where she begins her transformation into a mini-skirted, leather-clad blonde diva. Still, Capitol Records executives reject her for being too old and too black for the label. After all, they already had Diana Ross. But Capitol’s executives were brought to heel when David Bowie dragged them to New York’s rock club, the Ritz, to see her perform her first solo hit,  “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” Capitol immediately offered Tina Turner a new recording contract.

The climax of Rodger’s performance as Tina was yet to come. Her unbounded exuberance, the shaking, shimmying, fist-pumping energy!  It was her show and she carried it, literally channeling Tina Turner and celebrating her in the transcendent spirit of the star. Tina climbed the lighted stairway, toward thousands of starlights, an ode to her historic Brazilian concert attended by more than 180,000 fans. She descended the staircase, electrifying the audience as they jumped to their feet, and for an exhilarating ten minutes joined the finale, clapping in unison to the beat of “Nutbush City Limits” and “Proud Mary.” Tina Turner was alive, and the earth moved under our feet.

WHAT: TINA: THE TINA TURNER MUSICAL

WHEN: May 30 – June 4, 2023

WHERE: George S. And Dolores Dore Eccles Theater

HOW TO GO: Tickets and more info are available at saltlakecountyarts.org

Plan B Theatre’s revival production of Jennifer Nii’s highly acclaimed FIRE opened in April of 2023. FIRE, Nii’s farewell to her astonishing career as a playwright, features a stunning solo performance by Carleton Bluford as Wallace Thurman, the celebrated African American writer and editor who grew up in Salt Lake City. FIRE played from opening night to closing night to sold-out houses. 

As the lights dim, the stage’s backlights illuminate the simple backdrop with the word ‘FIRE’ rendered in bold red print. Wallace Thurman takes the stage with a haughty swagger that belies the struggle of a deeply committed Black artist seeking his freedom to create without artifice or compromise. And to do so in a place that averts its eyes from, nay scorns, Black cultural expression.

Thurman is, after all, a child of Salt Lake City, Utah—raised by his grandmother who ventured across the plains as Brigham Young’s servant; and the son of a peripatetic mother who broadened his experiences through travel and the reassurances of his intellect, individuality and artistic promise.

After two years at the University of Utah, Thurman hit the road westward. Seeking a vital, energetic Black community, he arrived at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Here, among his peers, Thurman discovered for the first time what it meant to be Black—in fact, too Black. In defiance and as an affirmative act of rebellion he founded Outlet, a Black cultural magazine. 

“Isn’t that what all subversives do?” Bluford’s Thurman asks.

Discouraged and without fanfare, Thurman boarded a train headed east to New York City. Here, he predicted, he’d find the Negro Nirvana, the site of the Black cultural Mecca. My heart swelled, too, as I saw and heard Thurman’s wild anticipation of joining the Harlem Renaissance; the collective contribution of such luminaries as the poet Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston’s voice of freedom, the exuberant poetry of Countee Cullen, and the creative energies of others. It was an era marked by a burst of Black creativity in art, music and literature. 

“It wasn’t until I arrived that Labor Day in 1925 that I finally understood what Brother Brigham meant when he let loose his cry into the thin cracking air, ‘This is the place.’ I like that crazy dude,” recalls Thurman.

Thurman and his like-minded comrades founded the FIRE a literary journal devoted to younger negro artists, proclaiming the arrival of Black cultural creativity. The magazine published just one issue.

But Thurman’s time in Harlem, absorbing the street fair machinations, the broad landscape of freedom and the creative vibrancy of the thinkers and artists, the energy of the creative work helped to define his commitment “To create and to try to do it well, he said, that is all I expect from any creative person.” But alongside, a cloud of physical depletion and alcoholism haunted him. He was largely able to ignore it as long as he was writing, creating and absorbing the vitality of the scene. That is until he could no longer ignore his declining health.

Thurman left Harlem’s Niggerati Manor, named for the Niggerati Literati, and boarded the train headed for Salt Lake City, seeking the curative powers of the clear mountain air. After a brief stay in Salt Lake City, he traveled to Reno where he sought a final divorce from his angry, vituperative wife Louise. In the throes of her accusations of his homosexuality, she succeeded in stripping him of his royalties, past, present and in perpetuity. Thurman was left impoverished and ill. Thus began his slow march to death.

Still, he continued to climb to the pinnacle of creative excellence, publishing Blacker the Berry a novel about intra-racial prejudice; and collaborating with William Jourdan Rapp on the play Harlem which opened on Broadway to rave reviews.  Other highly lauded books followed. Yet others were met with mixed reviews or all-out rejections, as publishers feared commercial failure.

Drinking heavily and increasingly weakened by the wrenching cough he carried with him, he returned to New York to seek medical care at City Hospital on Welfare Island, a hospital that he’d ironically excoriated in his earlier book citing its deplorable conditions, the despicable staff and absence of care whose conditions he exposed as “one of the great horrors in American health care, right here in New York.”

 “We are all alone when we die, whether with everyone who has loved us or in a solitary cinderblock room,” said 32-year-old Wallace Thurman.

As the stage lights dimmed and the audience exploded in deafening applause, I had a vision, one of playwright Jennifer Nii and Wallace Thurman, standing back to back, arms outstretched, fingertips touching, in the literal manifestation of Socrates’ ideal of  “Two bodies, one spirit.”

• Fire! by Jenifer Nii a one-actor show performed by Carleton Bluford as Wallace Thurman. Directed by Directed by Jerry Rapier with design by Maddy Ashton (set), Emma Belnap (lighting), Cheryl Ann Cluff (sound), and Aaron Swenson (costumes). Stage managed by Sammee Jackman.
• When:  April 13 to April 23, 2023
• Where: Plan-B Theatre in the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 138 W. Broadway, SLC

Dear Evan Hansen, opening Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023, at the Eccles Theater, in Salt Lake City, brings to the stage—in text and tone — the crushing isolation of a nerdy teenager, trapped in his own awkward snare. Evan Hansen is that socially inept, tic-filled kid whose biggest struggle is to face the throngs of high schoolers as he plods and weaves through each day.

But even as Evan falters and stumbles he learns the benefit of telling people what they want and need to hear. Once the story’s out, untrue though it is, the falsehoods collapse around him.

Winner of six Tony awards, Dear Evan Hansen has won numerous other awards, including the Drama League Award for Outstanding Musical Production and for the off-Broadway production, two Obie Awards, a Drama Desk Award and two Outer Critics Circle Awards and two Helen Hayes Awards.

Michael Greif, veteran director of luminous productions such as “Rent,” guides the inspiring book by Steven Levenson and haunting, score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul to its ultimate nuanced conclusion. 

Underneath the thick layers of insecurity, Evan yearns desperately for affection,  affection that ultimately spells trouble for its seeker. 

This is when Evan’s fateful encounter with his nemesis and salvation, Connor Murphy, finds Evan in the school’s computer room printing one of the daily “atta-boy” letters to himself that his therapist has advised him to write, thus the title “Dear Evan Hansen…” The letter, seized by Connor, is grist for his own mean mill. When Connor notices the blank white cast on Evan’s arm, he scrawls his name in bold letters across it and laughs a mocking, taunting laugh.

That evening Connor Murphy, a drug-addled, alienated schoolmate, commits suicide.

As news of Connor’s suicide and his so-called friendship with Evan spreads across the school, the class smart aleck Alana starts a fund in Connor’s name.  Pulled into the Connor Project’s school assembly, Evan is persuaded to give a speech. When the speech hits the social media platforms it becomes a sensation, and lackluster Evan becomes a social media phenom garnering thousands upon thousands of “likes.” 

And here we have the nub of the story. Dear Evan Hansen shows how social media have become both a way of advocating for good and inspiring collective participation, but also suggests that viral movements can spiral out of control, doing more damage than good.

Seduced by the long-awaited attention, yet silenced by the duplicity of his message Evan personifies the query of what happens when you do the wrong things for the right reasons.

The story and the themes it explore are both current and timeless. And it does so through the inspiring and memorable score. “You Will Be Found “ allows Evan to express what it feels like to be an anxious person desperate to connect, yet filled with hope.

“Have you ever felt like nobody was there? / Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere? / When you’re broken on the ground / You will be found / So let the sun come streaming in / ‘Cause you’ll reach up and you’ll rise again / You will be found ….

Dear Evan Hansen is a momentous production we’re looking forward to seeing the touring cast put it through it’s paces. And we’ll be sure to bring a hanky. 

THE TOURING CAST:  Anthony Norman as Evan Hansen; Alaina Anderson as Zoe Murphy; Coleen Sexton as Heidi Hansen; Lili Thomas as Cynthia Murphy; August Emerson as Connor Murphy; John Hemphill as Larry Murphy; Pablo David Laucerica as Jared Kleinman; Micaela Lamas as Alana Beck.

• What: Dear Evan Hansen
• When: Feb. 28 through March 5, 2023
• Where: George S. And Dolores Dore Eccles Theater
• How to go: Tickets and more info are available at saltlakecountyarts.org

Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations, opening Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023 as part of the Broadway at the Eccles series, is a veritable explosion of music and story. Woven into a tableau of America’s mid-century musical history, it promises to be both an exhilarating (and tragic) journey.

Spanning an era from doo-wop to psychedelic funk and beyond, The Temptations’ powerhouse career included hits like “My Girl,” “I Can’t Get Next to You,” “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” and of course, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” Along the journey from Detroit’s Motown to the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, The Temptations picked up 42 Top 10 Hits with 14 of those songs reaching number one.

Nominated for 12 Tony Awards and the winner of the 2019 Tony Award for Best Choreography, Ain’t Too Proud’s lush music and dramatic narrative seamlessly weaves the tale of five men who would be kings.

The odyssey, rife with drama, intrigue and betrayal, is a musical passage based on the surviving Temptation, Otis Williams’ autobiography  that examines the complex history of the band amid a rapidly shifting social and political landscape.

This feast of music and movement, created by Obie Award-winning playwright Domonique Morriseau, moves through the major stages of Williams’ memoir—the gathering of the legends and their rapid rise to stardom; the challenges of keeping the band together against adversaries from both within and outside the group; and the final tragic deaths of each member of the original Temptations—except for Williams, himself, of course.

Motown birthed The Temptations and its patriarch Barry Gordy gloried in their fame, even as he exercised authoritarian control over Motown’s stable of artists. Fearing that his cross-over audiences would take offense at what he characterized as “Black politics” he blocked their foray into the nascent anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements and took the protest song “War” out of The Temptations’ playbook, passing it to Edwin Starr. Still, the Temptations, like other Motown luminaries, moved along the historic path of protest in an era of cultural resistance.  

Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations is an electrifying memorial to the artists, who through commitment, struggle and singular success, breathed life into an era’s history. Or is that “Just My Imagination?”

The touring cast features Elijah Ahmad Lewis as David Ruffin; Marcus Paul James as Otis Williams; James T. Lane as Paul Williams; Jalen Harris as Eddie  Kendricks, Harrell Holmes as Melvin Franklin and Harris Mathews as Dennis Edwards. Running time is approximately two hours and 30 minutes including a 15-minute intermission.

See Linda Hunt’s full review of Ain’t Too Proud here and all of her theater coverage here.

• What: Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations
• When: Jan. 10-15, 2023 with matinee and evening performances Jan. 14 and Sunday, Jan. 15.
• Where: George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Theater
• How to go: Tickets and more info are available at saltlakecountyarts.org

The Moulin Rouge is open for business at the Eccles Theater. The Broadway reboot of the 2001 film starring Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman opened last weekend and will play through Dec. 11, 2022. Judging from the packed house on Friday night, this is the season’s hot ticket. 

The film is universally beloved and was natural to recreate in a theatrical setting. It is, after all, set at one of the world’s most famous performance halls, the eponymous Moulin Rouge where the Parisian upper crust slummed with Bohemian artists in Paris’ Montmartre District. But just because something can-can be done doesn’t mean it should-should. The original was a love song to pop legends delivered through director Baz Luhrmann’s MTV-ready lens. The Broadway version seems to think that the songs Luhrmann originally lionized are as interchangeable as singers in a K-pop band. Maybe they are. But die-hard fans of the film who are expecting a note-for-note retread are in for a surprise. 

The play follows the story of Christian (Conor Ryan), a cock-eyed optimist, who arrives in Paris to seek his fortune and is drawn into the world of the Moulin Rouge by the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, played by André Ward, whose paintings and playbills romanticized and ultimately created the lasting legend of the Moulin Rouge. In a case of mistaken identity, Christian is set up with the Moulin Rouge’s headlining courtesan, Satine, “the Shimmering Diamond” (Courtney Reed). The set-up, however, was intended for the rich and powerful Duke of Montroth (David Harris) whom the Moulin Rouge’s ringleader, Harold Zidler (Austin Durrant) has pinned hopes for the theater’s survival on. So there’s the love triangle. Of course, Satine and Christian fall madly in love thanks to Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Your Song,” which is thankfully preserved on the stage.

The Broadway version subs in newer pop anthems and power ballads throughout. A neat trick that the audience seemed to enjoy. It was like a game of name that tune. Trickles of applause came forth as soon as the crowd was able to guess “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele or “Raise Your Glass” by Pink had been swapped in. However, the substance of the changed songs has the effect of changing the plot and characters’ motivations. Still, the cast gamely ensures the show goes on. The production’s two standouts are Austin Durrant and André Ward as Ziller and LaTrec. They provided the bombast and power to back up the show’s true star: The production itself. The set is dazzling, to say the least, and lives up to all the myth and magic of the Moulin Rouge. This, however, has the effect of weighing down the other principles Conor Ryan and Courtney Reed as they live out their character’s love affair. Sorry kids it’s hard to compete with the sheer theatricality of this production. 

No matter. The crowd ate it all up. This, after all, was supposed to be a spectacle and it certainly was. Although much of the movie’s charm is lost in translation, the pomp and sheer over-the-top daring-do remain intact and that is worth a night at the Eccles. 

Moulin Rouge! The Musical runs through Dec. 11. 2022. For Tickets and information visit arttix.org.

Nutcracker productions during the holidays are as common as egg nog, but Ballet West’s production is the oldest Nutcracker in the nation and, by many, considered the best. In 1944, Ballet West founder Willam Christensen worked off the 1892 Russian version by by Pyotr Tchaikovsky that was lost in a sea of bad reviews and the tumult of the Bolshevik Revolution and two World Wars. Christensen revived it and gave it a fresh face for post-war American crowds. Thanks to Christensen (a native of Logan, Utah, B.T.W.), The Nutcracker has become the most frequently performed ballet and serves as an introduction to classical music for many. Christensen’s version is still preserved and performed each December by Ballet West and has been named “the best Nutcracker in the United States” by The New York Times. Besides watching the pros leap, spin, dip and soar (more on them on pg. 74), hundreds of local kids compete for spots in the iconic production each year at the historic Capitol Theatre. (Dec. 2-24, 2022)

Curious about the dancers of Ballet West? In our 2022 Nov/Dec issue, we interviewed four couples who found romance both on and off stage. Read more here.

When Charles Dickens sat down to write his “ghostly little book,” he endeavored to raise an idea that would not sour his readers on the Christmas season but “haunt their houses pleasantly.” Indeed, we have been haunted by A Christmas Carol since 1843. Its longevity may be due, in part, to Dickens’ performances of it. Starting in 1853, he took his show on the road in Britain then to the United States, and audiences could not get enough. Rather than read directly from his book, he transformed it into a performance piece. He rewrote, cut and pasted together pages, and added stage cues until he had a script worthy of the stage.

This too has passed into modern tradition with actors, storytellers and speakers who channel the spirit of Dickens and perform A Christmas Carol as he once did: one man, one stage, one book. Dane Allred is one such man, but it didn’t start out that way. “The first time I performed A Christmas Carol, I was the narrator in a version of it that one of my friends had written,” says Allred. He’s a retired Payson High School drama teacher and teaches public speaking at BYU and UVU. He started performing a version similar to Dickens’ at places like the Provo Tabernacle (before it caught fire) and the Provo Public Library. Even though he had it mostly memorized from playing the narrator, Allred says, “I like to recreate Dickens’ reading of it from his book.” In all of the years Allred performed A Christmas Carol at the library, he says, “There were people who came every single time. I would say, ‘You know the story isn’t going to change, right?’ and they would say, ‘That’s the point. We like it.’”

Now in his mid-60s, Allred hopes to pass the proverbial Dickensian torch to a new generation of orators and actors. Actors like Matthew Delafuente, who played Dickens two years running in A Christmas Carol one-man show at the Covey Center for the Arts in Provo. When it comes to the story’s staying power, Delafuente points to a passage when Scrooge is with the Ghost of Christmas Past and Dickens describes the brightness and joy of the Christmas celebration—family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, festive music, singing and dancing and playing games. “There are all of these things from A Christmas Carol that are now embedded in our own Christmas traditions,” says Delafuente, who has also played George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, so he’s becoming quite familiar with holiday traditions. “Dickens was a pioneer.”

Both Delafuente and Allred point to the themes in A Christmas Carol as another secret to its long-lived success. “Dickens used his performances to raise money for children’s hospitals,” says Allred (who was inspired by that charity to perform A Christmas Carol with free admission). Dickens’ concern for children in poverty was a key impetus for writing A Christmas Carol, and, in doing so, he inextricably merged the virtues of giving and charity with Christmastime.

“Ultimately, it’s a story about a selfish man who, by the end, learns to see the needs of others in a new light,” says Delafuente. “We relate because we all have that battle of learning to see things from a perspective outside our own.” 

“It’s a story of redemption,” says Allred. “I think it’s important to remember that Scrooge ends up as the good guy. We get to see him change, and think, ‘if he can change, why can’t I?’”

As much as the hundreds of film and TV adaptations and thousands of stage performances of A Christmas Carol might haunt us, it is the spirit of generosity that Dickens endeavored to have “haunt our homes pleasantly.” Less pleasantly, in the Ghost of Christmas Present’s parting words, there is also a warning concerning the children of Man, Ignorance and Want. “Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy [Ignorance], for on his brow I see that written which is Doom unless the writing be erased…Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!”  

Dickens’ Christmas Festival 

Every holiday season, Christmas magic transforms the Dixie Convention Center in St. George into a 19th century Victorian market. At the Dickens’ Christmas Festival, Utah vendors and performers travel back in time, don their (period-appropriate) gay apparel and celebrate the holidays with seasonal treats, locally made gifts and Father Christmas himself. 

Nov. 30-Dec. 3, 2022

If you’re even a casual rom-com fan, the basic plot of Fireflies, a play by Matthew Barber now at Pioneer Theatre Company, should be pretty familiar. You could probably get a good idea of where things are going from just the playbill summary—the narrative doesn’t depart much from the expected beats of an enemies-to-lovers arc. Despite, or maybe because of, the script’s if-it-ain’t-broke philosophy, Fireflies is a comforting, crowd-pleasing success. Sometimes, all you need is a pleasurable, well-told story with characters—who, in one notable way, depart from the expected mold—worth rooting for.

In a small Texas town, retired schoolteacher Eleanor (Joy Franz) lives alone on her parents’ property. (Both her mom and dad died years before the play began.) Though she is a respected figure in the community, Eleanor’s life is mostly a solitary one, aside from frequent, usually unannounced visits from her busybody neighbor Grace (Joy Lynn Jacobs). When a storm damages a roof on her property, Abel (David Manis), a drifter in town, offers to make repairs. While the prickly Eleanor is initially wary of Abel, their relationship slowly builds from distrust to cautious friendliness to an undeniable mutual attraction.

Fireflies stands out in one obvious way—both Eleanor and Abel are in their 70s. Onstage, and in pop culture more generally, it’s rare to see older characters as protagonists, especially in a story about new romance. Eleanor’s fear of aging, which is discussed simply and movingly, is a throughline in the play, including in a funny, fantastical scene where Eleanor imagines herself as an artifact at the natural history museum. The script’s matter-of-fact treatment of mortality adds dimension to the plot’s more conventional elements, and the characters’ ages are both central to the story and no-big-deal—the play reminds audiences that new experiences can happen at any age.          

A veteran of the stage for more than five decades, Franz leads the ensemble like the seasoned pro that she is. She is convincing as both a lovable curmudgeon and a lonely, sometimes vulnerable woman unmoored by aging and grief. The story just wouldn’t work without the chemistry between Eleanor and Abel, and both Franz and Manis are adept at portraying the couple’s slow burn—their opposites-attract connection always makes emotional sense. As the nosy neighbor, Jacobs gives a broad, lively performance. She gleefully chews on a sausage-gravy thick Texas accent, wears the hell out of a pink church lady ensemble (the costumes are by Brenda Van Der Wiel) and brings just enough pathos to prevent Grace from turning into a caricature. (Rounding out the cast, Tito Livas plays a small role as the dimwitted Sheriff Claymire, Eleanor’s former student.)                             

While characters occasionally spout nuggets of folksy wisdom, this intentionally modest play rarely strains to focus on anything more than the characters and their relationships. The appropriately low-key direction by Kareem Fahmy emphasizes quiet, simple moments, which all happen over the course of one week. Like Eleanor’s kitchen, the setting for almost all of the play, Fireflies is unassuming, warm and familiar. For audiences of any age, these characters, and the actors who play them, are easy to spend time with.        

Fireflies will be at Pioneer Theatre Company through April 16. For tickets and more information, visit PTC’s website. Read more theater reviews from Salt Lake.