At the beginning of the pandemic, some writers pointed out that Shakespeare wrote one of his most acclaimed plays, King Lear, in the middle of a plague. This led to speculation on what brilliant, era-defining work of art would come out of our modern plague. For writers, this was an unnecessary source of added pressure—in the middle of COVID, wasn’t surviving day-to-day enough of an achievement? I didn’t make an ill-advised attempt to write my next Great American Novel, but from a consumer’s perspective, I’m fine if we don’t get a coronavirus-era King Lear. Right now, escapist, joyful, well-crafted entertainment is more than enough. I need—to quote a lyric from Something Rotten!, which is now playing at Pioneer Theatre Company—“something more relaxing and less taxing on the brain.”

A proudly crowd-pleasing love letter to a proudly crowd-pleasing art form, Something Rotten! imagines a ridiculous alternate origin story to the classic musical. In 1590s England, William Shakespeare (Matthew Hydzik) is the most celebrated of the Renaissance playwrights, leaving other writers floundering in his shadow. Brothers Nick (Matt Farcher) and Nigel Bottom (Daniel Plimpton), who lead a struggling theater troupe, need to produce a hit play quickly before losing their patronage. While Nick’s ahead-of-his-time wife Bea (Galyana Castillo) wants to find work and ease the family’s financial burdens, Nick seeks advice from the soothsayer Nostradamus (Robert Anthony Jones) about his next play. Nostradamus gets a spotty vision about the future of theater—the Broadway musical. Though the Elizabethans are initially confused by the concept, Nick and Nigel forge ahead, believing it to be their perfect chance to one-up Shakespeare. Meanwhile, Nigel begins a passionate romance with Portia (Lexi Rabadi), the daughter of a Puritan (Kevin B. McGlynn) who opposes all theater and poetry.

If it’s not clear already, at least 80% of the plot is just an excuse for endless puns and references to both Shakespeare and popular musicals—some obvious, some niche and some in between. Something Rotten! has a throw-everything-at-the-wall approach to comedy. The jokes are all over the place, from genuinely clever to stupid funny to just plain stupid—the cast, though, fully commits to the absurdity, and, sometimes through sheer force of will, most of the bits land. 

The universally strong cast, all of whom are clearly having a lot of fun with the material, makes the material succeed. Farcher, a strong singer and dancer in a cast full of them, makes Nick relatable and sympathetic even when the Bottom brother spends a lot of the play acting like, well, an ass. As the sensitive, talented poet of the brother duo, Plimpton is totally charming, providing just enough human-sized emotion to ground the ridiculous farce. Though her character is sometimes underused, Castillo is also willing, completely selling her solo song “Right Hand Man” and providing a necessary female perspective. (In Shakespeare’s lifetime, women weren’t allowed on stage, even to play female characters.) Hydzik may have the most challenging task of all—partly because the role’s originator, Christian Borle, left a signature mark and won a Tony Award for the part and partly because the show’s glammy, leather-clad Shakespeare requires a rock-stars charisma. Luckily, Hydzik makes his own mark as the charming egomaniac who gets under Nick’s skin. 

Director and choreographer Karen Azenberg leads the talented ensemble, who effectively parody musicals while adeptly performing some classic musical trademarks, from energetic tap breaks to Fosse-style jazz hands to high-kicking chorus lines. In one inspired touch, an inappropriately chipper song about the Black Death includes subtle nods to our current deadly plague. Set designer George Maxwell builds a storybook version of Elizabethan England that perfectly fits the musical’s daffy alternate reality. Unfortunately, whether it was the sound design or the diction of the performers, it could be difficult to hear some of the music and dialogue. I was familiar with the soundtrack coming in, but newcomers may miss a lot of the best jokes in the show’s fast pacing. 

The score, by Karey and Wayne Patrick, fills fairly conventional Broadway-pop compositions to the brim with in-jokes and clever lines. In “A Musical,” an eight-minute song and the play’s highlight, Nostradamus predicts the entire future of musical theater. Jones’ brash, more-is-more performance is exactly what the musical calls for—he steals the show anytime he’s on stage. With callouts to a laundry list of musical favorites, from Les Misérables to A Chorus Line to Rent, the song captures the musical’s tone: a self-aware but loving sendup of the art form, targeted at devotees. In these moments, Something Rotten! both spoofs and delivers the genre’s simple pleasures. 

Something Rotten! will be at Pioneer Theatre Company through March 12. For tickets and more information, visit their website. Read more on Salt Lake City theater.

The cinematic Western landscapes and cowboy protagonists of Billy Schenck’s art aren’t just a fantasy—it’s in his DNA. The artist, who spent part of his childhood riding horses and farming cattle in Wyoming, is known as, in his words, one of the “granddaddies” of Western pop art. Though he spent part of his early career in New York City, Schenck, who now lives in New Mexico, fully embraces the Western lifestyle he depicts. In the mid ‘70s, he took the cowboy way of life one step further when a ranch manager taught him to ride bareback and saddle bronc. The only problem? “I was terrible,” he says. “I was getting just nearly killed, falling off one horse after another after another. It was really frustrating because rodeo was in my blood.”

Later in life, Schenck got back on the horse—literally. With the encouragement of a local rancher, he began team penning and ranch sorting. This time, he found much more success: he even won a ranch sorting world championship in 2009. He still ranch sorts in local shows, and is proud to say he had 10 perfect runs in one day. (In ranch sorting, a rider attempts to move ten cattle from one pen to another, in numerical order. A perfect run requires herding the cattle in sequence in 60 seconds.) Schenck, now in his 70s, says, “I take great pride in the fact that I can be that old and still be competitive and just knock the socks off of people on occasions.”

Schenck’s genuine love for the American West—its culture, its iconography, its landscapes—is on full display in his two simultaneous Utah exhibitions: Schenck’s Utah: A Land Less Traveled at Modern West and Billy Schenck: Myth of the West at the Southern Utah Museum of Art. 

Schenck’s Utah is the first show of his career to focus entirely on landscape art. In the first decades of his career, landscapes were solely in the background of his figurative and caption paintings. The dramatic red rock mesas of southern Utah, though, have always been integral to Schenck’s work—he says he’s been “inspired by the Utah landscape since almost day one, which would be 52 years ago.” In the early 2000s, he began working on landscapes without figures. Why? “Just to see if I could do it,” he says. Shalee Cooper, Gallery Director of Modern West, was drawn to Schenck’s distinctive interpretations of Utah geography and encouraged Schenck to display his landscape works for this exhibition.

The paintings and serigraphs in Schenck’s Utah feature dramatic shadows and lonely, beautiful expanses of quiet desert. The scenes are quintessentially Utah, but up close, the sharp divisions  between colors and shapes feel more surreal—in “Caution Hot Cows,” for example, spindly black tree branches contrast with white clouds, jagged like puzzle pieces. Some works, like “Late Day Monsoons,” feature moody shades of brown and gray; others bring an unexpected vibrancy to stretches of barren land. 

To create his paintings, Schenck starts with a road trip—to Monument Valley, Arches National Park or other locations in the southern Utah desert that catch his eye. He photographs rock formations and landscapes and then returns to the studio, where he uses a slide projector to review images for inspiration. “I go through the carousels until I find a group—maybe three, five, 10 slides—and just see how they’ll match up,” he says. He starts with the foreground—usually a dramatic rock formation or sand dune—moves to the middle ground, then the background and finishes with his dramatic skyscapes, developing the color palette as he goes. This process—partly a composite of real locations, partly an exploration of his own imagination—explains the familiar yet otherworldly quality of his work.

At Southern Utah Museum of Art, Billy Schenck: Myth of the West is a career-spanning retrospective that includes works from various points of Schenck’s more than four decades-long career. The exhibition, which includes 25 paintings and three serigraphs, illustrates some of Schenck’s trademarks: a striking, colorful reductivist style, offbeat humor and surprising interpretations of classic Western iconography.  

Myth of the West ties Schenck to his varied influences. His idiosyncratic style comes from several directions—the marriage of text and image of Roy Lichtenstein’s caption paintings, the methodology of the photorealists in the 1960s and 70s and even the subject matter of classic Spaghetti Westerns. (After first seeing Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, Schenck thought to himself, “I need to try to do in paintings what this guy has done in film.”) At SUMA, Schenck’s work is paired with one of his key influences—Andy Warhol. Warhol’s Cowboys & Indians includes 10 prints and four trial proofs from Warhol’s last project in the 1980s. For Schenck, this exhibition is a full circle moment—he even worked with Warhol and The Velvet Underground for a brief period in 1966, when Schenck learned from pop art pioneers in New York City. Michael Duchemin, director of the Briscoe Museum in San Antonio, first paired Schenck with Warhol, linking Western artists with the larger pop art tradition. (“I thought it was great for my career. It isn’t gonna affect Andy too much one way or the other,” Schenck quips.) 

For Schenck, Myth of the West has been a chance to track the evolution of his work over the decades. This recollection, though, hasn’t slowed him down—in fact, it’s only led to more inspiration. “I’ve got ideas coming out of my ears,” he says. “I can’t even begin to catch up with them at this point.”

For more information on these exhibitions, visit Modern West and SUMA’s websites. Subscribe to Salt Lake magazine for more on life in Utah.

After a long, epic season of federal fraud challenges, hot mic revelations and debates over whether eating at Taco Bell makes a person “fake” (if anything, it makes a person more real!) we have finally reached the end of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Season 2. And after 21 episodes of brain-smoothing insanity, this finale is a bit like palate cleanser, which is understandable but a little underwhelming. For most of the episode, we get relatively sympathetic, relatively quiet individual moments with the women, and the season’s final, inevitable series of fights and dramatic exits feels slight compared to the fireworks of Vail and Zion. After five long months, I’m tired, Andy Cohen is definitely tired and even the cast seems tired. I say let Jennie Nguyen throw her little glass and get her screen time while she still has the chance.

Before that, though, we get a perfunctory wrapup of several dangling subplots. Jen, a woman of the people, is moving into a 4,500 square foot Park City ski mansion from her 9,000 square foot Park City ski mansion. (Working class icon!!) As Murilo, who is still hot, takes notes, two patient, sweet movers realize that transporting Jen’s closet alone could easily turn into a years-long project. I need some sort of HGTV series about these movers trying to explain to Jen that moving to a house half the size means she can only keep half of her stuff. The trials and tribulations of a $2 million retainer!

I’ve always found Heather’s “good Mormon gone bad” narrative both compelling and sympathetic, but this episode makes me hope that she has a new character arc for Season 3. After pandemic delays, Heather finally plans a memorial for her dad, who died in 2020. The gathering has some noticeable absences—her mom and several of her siblings refused to show. For Heather, this is even more confirmation that she is being rejected for leaving the Church, and the celebration of life turns into a long speech on her own faith crisis. I have no idea why Heather’s family didn’t join the memorial, but I suspect it’s just as likely that some of the family didn’t want to participate in something so personal in front of reality TV cameras which, in my mind, is completely understandable. (Heather’s mom does briefly drive by the graveside service, but her face is blurred and she doesn’t stay.) Week to week, Heather is the most purely likable member of the cast, and while her faith crisis is a uniquely Utah story that the show was wise to focus on, she definitely has more to offer. I hope she gets a narrative makeover when the series returns. 

In, somehow, the show’s first scene at the Bonneville Salt Flats, undercover camp icon Meredith Marks plans a perfectly bonkers photo shoot for her jewelry brand that I completely forgot existed. Meredith also gets another chance to give a little TED Talk about gay allysip, confirming that all of her jewelry is gender-neutral and that this photo shoot will raise money for GLAAD. (Woke queen!) To show off her jewelry, a literal bus full of models (plus Brooks and Chloe) in Euphoria makeup put on some (honestly great) pastel suits. This shoot teaches us two things about Brooks: 1. Despite long standing rumors, the closest thing we’ll see to Brooks coming out is Meredith saying that Brooks “is on his own journey,” and 2. Brooks “Don’t Say The Word Vagina In Front of Me” Marks is perfectly fine with making an incest joke during the shoot. Great! Seth, who gamely wore some bold eye shadow for the occasion, has never been more likable, and the shoot ends with everyone in matching T-shirts that read “LGBTQ Rights? I’m Engaging!” If these aren’t for sale in time for Pride, Meredith is a damn fool!

In probably the most uncomfortable scene yet on the series—which is a tough competition— Whitney decides to end her sexual rut with Justin…on camera. He comes home from a trip and is “surprised” (Oh God I hope he wasn’t actually surprised) by Whitney in a sexy red swimsuit. Here’s what I can best tell happened as I watched this scene through fingers covering my eyes: Justin drinks champagne directly from Whitney’s boobs. Justin and Whitney move to the bedroom, where he’s instructed to take off his clothes. (His chain stays ON during sex.) Whitney wears only pasties and underwerar. They do some “love art,” which involves squirting body paint on each other, making out and Justin spanking Whitney. Hard. The cameras, graciously, stop rolling before things gets too hot for Bravo. Justin and Whitney have proved themselves to be the series’ best couple in Season 2, but, um, I didn’t need to see all of this! Y’all have fun though! 

During a moment of harmony in Zion, Lisa invited everyone to her ‘80s-inspired Vida Tequila party. Lisa, who has been accused of using guest lists to play psychological mind games, may have tried to extend an olive branch with the invite, but at this point, it’s too little too late. Every cast member has at least one other person they can’t stand being in a room with. Still, Lisa is not one to turn down a branding opportunity, so the event forges forward. I am hypnotized by Lisa’s descriptions of her event. She says the food is “inspired by mall eats on a luxury scale.” (Translation: Enjoy these overpriced churros.) She chose the ‘80s and ‘90s inspiration because that era is “the height of fashion and decadence.” (Why not.) Though the party had a clear theme, Lisa insists that she doesn’t want anyone to show up in costumes—if this is a way to subtly embarrass the other Housewives who do take the dress code seriously, Lisa is much more shrewd than Mary telling Whitney to show up to a pasta-making class dressed like Luigi or whatever the fuck.

When Meredith arrives, the rest of the women wonder what will happen after her and Lisa’s feud in Zion. (And nobody even knows yet about Lisa’s already-infamous “she’s fucked half of New York” rant!) In a development that should surprise no one, Lisa and Meredith seem…perfectly fine. Perhaps more than anyone in the cast, these two are able to grin and bear it in the middle of a social event, so we’ll have to look elsewhere for catfights. Mary, who, as usual, spends the party muttering hexes and making the most awkward small talk imaginable, gets dragged into conflict against her will. First, Jennie is mad that Mary is ignoring her, which seems like a lucky break to me, but whatever. Then, Whitney, who just chased Vida with more Vida, wants to apologize to Mary for criticizing her church. (To give Mary slight credit, I would also avoid any conversations with drunk Whitney.) Jennie, though, is desperate to grab her last morsels of screen time—she interrupts Whitney’s conversation to remind Mary that she’s rude, throws a glass when Mary tries to run away and milks the half-baked drama for all its worth.

After Mary leaves the party early, the rest of the cast gather for the final time this season to talk shit. (The husbands chat too, but their conversation is so boring I am physically unable to write about it.) Jen, for some reason, asks again why Meredith won’t be friends with her. Meredith simply loves to monologue about the pain inflicted on her “fam-uh-lee,” and I truly don’t know what Jen hopes to accomplish by once again giving her the opportunity. Somehow, they once again talk about Jen spreading rumors about Meredith’s marriage, which is, objectively, a thing that happened. Meredith gets to do another thing she loves—dramatically storm away from a party—while screaming “I’ll talk about who everybody dated that NOBODY knows about!” To this I say, don’t be shy Meredith! Jen and Lisa are left dumbfounded, and Jen tells Lisa,“You’re signing up for somebody and it’s not my fucking fault that she fucked the entire fucking Upper East Side.” And on this sour, slut-shamey note, we say goodbye to Season 2. By the end of the night, everyone seems vaguely miserable except for Whitney and Justin, who are fully making out in a corner. Have fun kids!                 

Next week, the cast meets on the set of an Off-Off-Broadway production of Frozen for a three-part reunion. Andy Cohen, doing the Lord’s work, will ask actual questions about Jen’s arrest, and I’m sure Meredith will have plenty to say about her bestie of 10 years saying every mean thing she can think of behind her back on camera. I can’t wait!

Random observations:

• While on glam squad duties, Murilo (call me) wears a #FreeJenShah shirt with the photo of Jen in her box braids! I need one of these so badly!
• Thank you to the Bravo editors for the Lisa love counter, which counted how many times Lisa said “love” in a single meeting (16). This data needed to be released to the general public.          
• I’m still disturbed that Jack told Lisa to wear “whatever covers you up more.” Ick!
• I don’t know if Jen’s Gucci outfit fit the 80s theme, but she did look good!
• Speaking of party fashion, Seth wears a Reagan/Bush ‘84 T-shirt, eliminating all good will from the GLAAD shoot. 
• Heather is definitely the person you want to hang out with at a mall-inspired Vida Tequila launch party. She has great rapport with the husbands, makes fun of Meredith for only eating a single slider and leaves the table as soon as Meredith and Jen are back on their bullshit. Great work! No notes.                      

Catch up with all of our recaps of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.