Thumbs Down.

This week I got to go to the Utah Shakespearean festival. It was great! We got to see all six shows, plus a special backstage tour and the New Excecutive Director invited us to his house. I don't have any pictures from that trip because I was too busy having fun to take any. So I got to see six wonderful plays and I couldn't wait to get back to Logan and see the Utah Festival Opera do Into The Woods. As pretty much all of you know this has been one of my favorite shows since I was about four, and I played one of the lead roles in my high schools production of it. Sadly, I was disappointed. The actors were all opera singers so they didn't feel the need to over enunciate. None of them were really in touch with the real emotion of the play, they were like card-board figures or cartoons. The relationships between the characters were badly underdeveloped, and worst of all, they had a light on backstage, and from where I was sitting you could see the tech people walking around backstage. I'm very rarely disappointed with a professional production because I'm fairly easily entertained, but seriously, acting-wise Renn Hatt and the Greenriver High ensemble did a better job. I will say this: The princes were very good, so was the narrator, Jack was alright and the steward was alright. No one else really believed what they were saying and red riding hood was probably in her mid to late fifties, dead ringer for a ten-year-old girl right? It rather reminded me of Joann Arnold as Peter Pan. I'm hoping to see 1776 and I'm hoping it will be better. But if you want to see Into the Woods I say wait until October and go see it at Hale.