The New Hale Centre Theatre, in Sandy, Utah

Last updated on: November 8, 2017 at 1:20 pm by Dan Peterson

The New Hale Centre Theatre, in Sandy, Utah 2017-11-08T13:20:05-07:00 Dan Peterson

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A view of the Wasatch Front from a neighborhood in Sandy, in the south Salt Lake Valley
(Wikimedia Commons public domain)

My wife and I attended a performance, last night, of Forever Plaid on the Sorenson Legacy Jewel Box Stage at the new Hale Centre Theatre in the very nearly completed Mountain America Performing Arts Centre.

Forever Plaid is, I’ll admit, not my absolutely favorite play. But it’s entertaining and fun, and the superb cast that we saw last night included a son of our very, very good and longtime friends Dil and Laura Beth Parkinson, who are currently serving a Latter-day Saint humanitarian service mission in the Near East after his recent retirement from my own Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages. (Far more than anybody else, Dil was responsible for creating BYU’s nationally and internationally respected Arabic program.)

The cast did a fantastic, virtually flawless job. Their singing was excellent.

Almost immediately after we arrived in the lobby of the new building, Clint Rice, one of the senior officers at the Hale Centre Theatre, spotted us and kindly invited us to take a sneak peak at the main stage, which, he says, will be completed — whatever it takes — by 16 November.

We were delighted. And awed. The new theater is spectacular. And the lesser (!) Sorenson Legacy Jewel Box Stage, already functioning, is wonderful, as well. The whole building is far more beautiful, larger, and grander than I was expecting.

The old venue in West Valley City was quite nice, and I was sorry when I heard that the theater company was moving. The new building is much more impressive, though. Well beyond what I had anticipated.

The Wasatch Front is being given a magnificent new cultural treasure.

“If I were placed on a cannibal island and given a task of civilizing its people,” Brigham Young is reported to have remarked, “I should straightway build a theatre.”

I’m not sure whether his specific reasons for making that statement still fully hold, but one of the great satisfactions of my life has been that I married a theater major who has encouraged me — it hasn’t taken much encouragement, if any, for a very long time (if, indeed, it ever did) — to attend live plays and operas, when we can fit them in, almost everywhere we go. We’ve done Broadway and Lincoln Center and London’s West End and the Mark Taper Forum and the Chicago Lyric Opera and the Ashland Shakespeare Festival and San Diego’s Globe Theater and everything from Shakespeare to medieval mystery plays at the Folger Shakespeare Library. And, of course, we’ve been attending the Utah Shakespeare Festival faithfully since our children were very small. Weird highlights have included such things as seeing a performance of Waiting for Godot in Oxford, many years ago, that had been directed by Samuel Beckett himself. She’s even been willing to go with me two of the three times that I’ve attended the passion play at Oberammergau — the first time was before we’d met — and she’s planning to go with me for my projected fourth time, in 2020.

Such things have immeasurably enriched my life.

If you haven’t been to a play at the Hale Centre Theatre, try it. But be aware that the tickets go pretty fast.

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