SimonFest Celebrates 20 Years in Southern Utah
SimonFest Theatre Company is twenty years old this year and celebrating its anniversary season with two grand musicals, plus two popular comedies.
Founder Richard Bugg proclaims, “We have always focused on producing character-driven plays that allow us to share with our audience a fun and cathartic journey. This year is no exception. These shared experiences with great theatrical stories, bring us together with empathy and understanding. What could be more important that during our current political climate.”
Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita charts the young and ambitious Eva Peron’s meteoric rise to sainthood. Set in Argentina between 1934-1953, the Tony-winning musical follow Eva Duarte on her journey from poor illegitimate child to ambitious actress to (as wife of military leader-turned-president Juan Perón,) the most powerful woman in Latin America, before her death from cancer at age 33. This musical masterpiece includes the beloved song, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.”
The comical, yet heartbreaking and inspirational Tony Award-winning musical, Man of La Mancha, based on Cervantes’ Don Quixote, is one of the world’s most popular musicals. Inspired by Miguel de Cervantes’ seventeenth-century masterwork, Don Quixote, and set during the Spanish Inquisition, Dale Wasserman, Mitch Leigh, and Joe Darion have transformed these classic tales into a musical masterpiece. The original 1965 production won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Cervantes is in prison awaiting trial during the Spanish Inquisition. He and his fellow prisoners perform a play-within-a-play, telling the story of the elderly Alonso Quijana, who renames himself “Don Quixote” and goes on a quest to right all wrongs in the world. The rousing, Spanish-inflected score includes the classic numbers “The Impossible Dream,” “I, Don Quixote,” and “Dulcinea.”
Welcome to Almost, Maine, a play by John Cariani, a place that’s so far north, it’s almost not in the United States. it’s not quite a town, because its residents never got around to getting organized. So it almost doesn’t exist. One cold, clear, winter night, as the northern lights hover in the star-filled sky above, the residents of Almost, Maine, find themselves falling in and out of love in unexpected and hilarious ways. Knees are bruised. Hearts are broken. But the bruises heal, and the hearts mend—almost—in this delightful midwinter night’s dream.
A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters is about a romantic friendship and correspondence destined to last for almost half a century. Over the course of their lives, Andy and Melissa’s relationship goes through many changes. Love Letters is a tender, tragi-comic, and nuanced examination of the shared nostalgia, missed opportunities, and deep closeness of two lifelong, complicated friends. While spanning five decades and numerous locations, it is staged simply, with two actors letting their words describe a world of emotion. Celebrity Clarence Gilyard (Walker, Texas Ranger, Matlock, Die Hard) stars alongside local favorite Janice Brooks.
The SimonFest Summer Season runs July 7th through July 30th at the Heritage Center Theatre in Cedar City. For performance times and ticket information, go to SimonFest.org or call 435-267-0194.
