UTAH MUSICAL THEATRE ‘MAGICALLY CREATES EXPANDED 1993 SEASON BY CHARLIE SCHILL SOFT SHOE — Jim Christian leads student actors through a dance rehearsal. y September, Jim Christian will have earned the right to add “magician” and “juggler” to his official titles of associate professor of performing arts and artistic director of the University-based Utah Musical Theatre. “Many of our loyal patrons were disappointed when they couldn’t get tickets for our sold-out season last year,” Mr. Christian says. “For UMT to be successful this year, we knew that we’d have to significantly increase the number of seats available to our audiences. That meant figuring out a way to present more performances of our musicals without lengthening the late-June to late-August season or diminishing the quality of our acting, singing, dancing and stagecraft.” Impossible? That’s what most people thought until Mr. Christian announced plans to move one of the season’s four productions from UMT’s main stage in the Allred Theater of the Val A. Lw& Browning Center for the Performing Arts, Jim Christian to the smaller, more intimate Monson Theater in the center’s basement. Then Mr. Christian and the UMT staff creatively “juggled” the troupe’s production schedule to extend the run of the three main-stage productions (“Peter Pan,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “West Side Story”) from two to three weeks each while performing the fourth musical (“Pump Boys & Dinettes”) for eight consecutive weeks. “We think that everybody on both sides of the footlights will really enjoy this new schedule,” Mr. Christian says. By stretching the run of the main-stage productions by one week, Mr. Christian increased the number of available seats by about 50 percent to nearly 5,000 per show. “The new schedule will also benefit UMT’s cast and crews by giving us three weeks of rehearsal time between mainstage productions rather than the two weeks we’ve had in previous years. That means more time for the performers to craft their characterizations and practice their singing and dancing, more time for our technical crews to polish the sets and lighting, more time to fine tune particularly challenging scenes. “T believe the staging process will be less stressful and more professionally rewarding for the company,” Mr. Christian says. oe The end result is a 1993 season that will provide shows that are of a higher quality artistically as well as more chances to see productions. UMT was organized in the fall of 1980 when a small but determined group of theater artists met to discuss ways the summer theater offerings at Weber State could be expanded. They decided to focus their efforts on a single theatrical form — the musical — and to offer productions of the finest possible quality. Originally called the Golden Spike Repertory Theatre, the 15 performances scheduled for each main-stage show upstairs in the Allred Theater. So the overall number of seats available for ‘Pump Boys’ will match that of our main-stage productions.” Mr. Christian says the 1993 season will offer more of the same theater fare that has delighted local audiences for more than a decade. “We always tried to vary the emotions and tones in our seasons,” Mr. Christian says. “We give our audiences something a little frivolous alongside something serious; mix something very traditional and something innovative. So we run the gamut from something as light as a child’s fairy tale in ‘Peter Pan’ to clashing traditions in ‘Fiddler’ to racial and ethnic prejudice in ‘West Side.’ ‘Pump Boys’ has a lively county-western flavor without descending into lyrics as inane as ‘I lost my dog, my girl, my pickup truck and my job.’ ” Despite that obvious diversity, Mr. Christian says there is a thematic thread between “Peter Pan,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “West Side Story.” Each show was originally produced on the Broadway stage by Jerome Robbins. “Few people are aware of that link because Robbins never put the kind of characteristic trademarks on his productions that audiences have grown accustomed to from producers like Bob Fosse or Gower Champion,” Mr. Christian says. “Robbins’ genius was to let the originality and strength of each play shine through rather than molding them to his particular likes and dislikes. I think our audiences will appreciate his wisdom by the time the 1993 season is over.” the name was changed to Utah Musical Theatre in 1984 in recognition of the program’s emphasis on musicals. UMT’s popularity has reached unprecedented levels in recent years. Sue Hiatt, the troupe’s publicity manager, says only about one-third of the program’s 12,000 total seats were sold to season ticket holders in 1989. But season ticket holders occupied about 8,000 seats last year and all 52 performances on the UMT 1992 Mr. Schill is a writer with Continuing Education at the University. schedule were sold out. UMT organizers hope to eventually relocate their summerstock productions to a renovated Egyptian Theatre that is the centerpiece for the proposed Weber County conference and performing arts center in downtown Ogden. That move would boost the audience capacity for each performance of UMT’s main-stage productions to 650, nearly doubling the seating now available in the Allred Theater at Weber State. In the meantime, Mr. Christian believes his “magic trick” of moving one production each summer into the Monson Theater will satisfy local audience demand for a few years at least. “The Monson Theater seats fewer than 200 people,” he says, “but our ‘juggling act’ will let us perform ‘Pump CENTER STAGE — Brad Sikorski, a freshman from Monroe, Minn., majoring in musical theater, tries Boys and Dinettes’ 33 times rather than — scene during a UMT practice while fellow student actors look on. to steal the