As 2025 comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on the sheer breadth of work that crossed Utah stages—and my desk—this year. With over 70 published pieces across The Rhetorical Review and other outlets, this marked my most expansive year of writing yet, spanning theatre criticism, dance and music, artist interviews, environmental journalism, children’s theatre, and cultural commentary. More than volume, though, what stands out is how interconnected these works feel: art speaking to land, identity, community, memory, and survival.
This year didn’t belong to one genre, one institution, or one aesthetic. It belonged to many kinds of storytelling—often overlapping, sometimes challenging, and frequently reminding me why live performance still matters, especially here. Rather than ranking or naming “the best,” what follows is a curated reflection on the patterns, conversations, and standout moments that shaped my 2025 arts criticism life.
Performance as Archive
A core throughline in my writing this year was sustained attention to performance as a living archive—an idea that also anchors my academic work. Many productions weren’t just telling stories; they were holding memory, documenting experiences that might otherwise go unrecorded.
Works such as The Aunties (Indigenous Performance Productions at UtahPresents), Dear Jack, Dear Louise (by Ken Ludwig at Utah Shakespeare Festival), Just Add Water (by Matthew Ivan Bennett and Elaine Jarvik at Plan B-Theatre), Steel Magnolias (by Robert Harling at Utah Shakespeare Festival), and A’lante Flamenco’s Westminster concert treated performance as a space where grief, ancestry, care, and resistance are embodied rather than explained. Even hearing pianist Wynona Yinuo Wang recall childhood memories of her grandmother—before playing Zhang Zhao’s Kangding Love Song and Pi Huang—became an archival act, sound carrying memory across generations.
One work that stands out to me is SLAC’s Western Minerals & Their Origins by Connor Johnson and Footpath Theatre Company. Although I did not review its 2025 remount, I was one of the few people to review their original world premiere at the 2024 SLC fringe. Attending this year was a proud moment for me, seeing how much this creative team has grown and how flawlessly they took all of the critiques from my world premiere review and delivered a play that wowed me and had audience members crying in the room around me. Set between a cluttered garage and the mythic red rock of the Utah Southwest, Western Minerals treats land as both archive and collaborator—memory sedimented into stone, music, and movement. Some performances do not end when they close; they continue to accrue meaning over time—and that was definitely the case here.
Youth Theatre and Family-Centered Work
Children’s and youth theatre remains an under-reviewed corner of arts criticism, and I’m proud that several 2025 pieces treated these productions with the same seriousness afforded to adult work.
The Box-Car Children (adapted by Melissa Leilani Larson for Creekside Fest), SLAC’s Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed by Mo Willems (music by Deborah Wicks La Puma), and Eb & Flo by Elaine Jarvik (Plan-B Theatre Company) demonstrated that theatre for young audiences can be playful, ethical, politically aware, and emotionally sophisticated. These shows didn’t talk down to children—they trusted them with complex themes and intellectual rigor.
Large-Scale Regional Institutions
Alongside experimental and community-based work, 2025 also saw robust programming from Utah’s major institutions. I covered productions from Pioneer Theatre Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, Broadway at the Eccles, Tuacahn Amphitheatre, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Westminster Performing Arts, the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation, UtahPresents, and more, often noting how institutional scale can both amplify and complicate storytelling.
Some of the productions included PTC’s Noises Off by Michael Frayn, Waitress by Jessie Nelson with music by Sara Bareilles, Dear Evan Hansen (Pasek & Paul / Steven Levenson), Broadway at the Eccles’s Suffs by Shaina Taub, Life of Pi adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti, Some Like It Hot (book by Matthew López & Amber Ruffin), Tuacahn’s Newsies (Harvey Fierstein / Alan Menken), The Little Mermaid (Ashman/Menken), Westminster’s The Hatmaker’s Wife, and multiple Bachauer concerts featuring artists like Wynona Yinuo Wang, Arthur Greene. Together, these works reveal the ongoing tension between scale and specificity—between institutional reach and the question of who feels invited into these stories and performances.
One production that continues to linger with me—and one I have not yet written about—is Utah Opera’s 2025 Madama Butterfly, directed by Matthew Ozawa. Framed as a virtual-reality fantasy shaped by Pinkerton’s perspective and developed by an all–Japanese and Japanese American creative team—including scenic designer Kimie Nishikawa, costume designer Maiko Matsushima, and lighting designer Yuki Nakase Link—the production resisted inherited romantic spectacle in favor of exposure, making the opera’s colonial scaffolding visible rather than seamless. I particularly appreciated this dimension of the work, which was further contextualized through the pre- and post-show conversations. In those discussions, the adapters—a Japanese creative team led by Japanese women—were described as having reimagined the opera in response to not seeing themselves reflected in the original portrayal of the woman. This recognition prompted a necessary intervention: if the character did not represent them, how might the narrative be responsibly and meaningfully updated?
That reframing allowed audiences to recognize that Pinkerton’s sexualization of Japanese women is not an inevitable or defensible aspect of the story, but a choice—one the production actively resisted by foregrounding its consequences rather than its allure. In doing so, Madama Butterfly offers a compelling example of how large-scale institutions can engage canonical works with accountability, demonstrating how scale, authorship, and ethical framing can invite critical attention rather than passive consumption. P.S. I am thinking about writing an article for publication on this…
Embodiment, Aesthetics, and the Body as Archive
Across 2025, I was repeatedly drawn to performances where meaning lived in the body as much as the text—where motion, rhythm, ritual, and silence carried memory and resistance. At UtahPresents, Kurbasy’s Songs of the Ukrainian Forest fused music, movement, and ritual into a mythic ecology, using projections, polyphonic song, and moments of stillness to ground cultural memory in land and community. A’lante Flamenco’s concert at Westminster foregrounded ancestry through minimalist design, where hands, feet, and spine carried lineage as clearly as sound. Ballet Hispánico, presented by UtahPresents, offered a vision of Hispanidad not bound by folklórico expectations of the past: the choreography was dynamic, layered, exciting, and meaningful.
Other works translated interior states through embodiment: At Pioneer Theatre Company, A Case for the Existence of God by Samuel D. Hunter offered an intimate, minimalist exploration of economic precarity, fatherhood, and male friendship, using quiet naturalism and charged stillness to reveal how vulnerability and connection persist amid structural constraint.
Good Company Theatre, co-founded by sisters Alicia Washington and Camille Washington, offered some of the year’s most compelling embodied aesthetics with Coach Coach by Bailey Williams. As Utah’s only Black-owned theatre company, their work stood out for both its artistic intelligence and its cultural presence.
Skyler Denfeld’s Paper Weight at The Hive in Provo, produced by Vicariously Staged Productions (VSP), founded in 2024 by Native Hawaiian actor and producer Jared Kamauu. This world premiere—an experimental meditation on early-onset Alzheimer’s—translated memory loss into physical vocabulary: repeated gestures, shifting breath patterns, bodies collapsing and reconstituting time. Rather than depict memory as narrative clarity, the production asked audiences to feel cognitive drift with the actors and dancers.
And Irene Loy’s experimental play Book of Ego, grounded in drama therapy, made the body itself a site of excavation and repair. Revealing how aesthetics carry memory, rendering interior histories legible through form, movement, and presence.
BIPOC-Centered Productions (Black and/or Indigenous and/Or People of Color)
At UtahPresents, in collaboration with Plan-B Theatre Company, I covered the world premiere of KILO-WAT by Aaron Asano Swenson, a one-person archival performance that weaves basketball, war memory, and Japanese storytelling practices into an inquiry into how Japanese American histories are fragmented, mediated, and ethically reconstructed. Plan-B also presented Just Add Water by Matthew Ivan Bennett and Elaine Jarvik, which positioned the Great Salt Lake as both witness and archive, insisting on environmental memory as cultural responsibility, centering Native American knowledge. Additional BIPOC-centered works included Dreamgirls by Tom Eyen, staged at The Grand Theatre, and Juan Jose & the Deathly Vatos by Pedro Flores (Plan-B Theatre Company), a Chicano fantasy that fused pop culture, language play, and resistance. One of the most meaningful for me was The Aunties at UtahPresents, as I was able to work with Producer Andre Bouchard in a presentation at the Hinkley Institute of Politics in a related talk.
These works did not ask to be “included.” They asserted their place through authorship, embodiment, and the insistence that story, land, and identity remain inseparable.
From Kilo-Wat, Design by Playwright Aaron Asano Swenson
Queer, Nonbinary, and Gender-Performance Theatre
Queer and gender-performance theatre was a defining current of 2025. From Meanwhile Park’s double-world premiere (Vacation and Red Devil) to The Moors (Voodoo Theatre Comany), & Juliet (Broadway at the Eccles), The Rocky Horror Show (Ziegfeld Theatre), The Big Quiet (PYG), My Brother Was a Vampire (produced by Immigrant’s Daughter Theatre and Lil Poppet Productions), Tootsie (Ziegfeld Theatre), Mrs. Doubtfire (Broadway at the Eccles), Suffs (Broadway at the Eccles) and The Beatrix Potter Defense Society (Plan-B Theatre Company), gender-focused theatre in Utah this year was funny, furious, tender, and insistently political.
That lens extended beyond The Rhetorical Review. In Utah Theatre Bloggers Association, my review of Parker Theatre’s The Woman in Black approached gothic horror through feminist haunting and gendered silence, revealing how invisibility itself can be weaponized. Taken together, these works positioned queer and gender-performance not as a niche, but as critical infrastructure—reshaping who is allowed to be centered, heard, and remembered.
A Living Record
Many of the productions I covered this year will not receive lasting in-depth documentation beyond a program and a closing night. In that sense, criticism becomes more than a response—it becomes a record and an act of care.
Utah theatre in 2025 was ambitious, tender, political, funny, flawed, and alive. I’m deeply grateful to have witnessed—and written alongside—it. To all the plays, musicals, musicians, dancers, artists, and more, who allowed me into their circle—Thank you!
As a funded PhD student, I owe deep gratitude to the University of Utah and my mentor, Dr. Romeo García, a decolonial archivist. And as someone writing a dissertation on performance as archive and counter-archive, I offer my respect to the Eight Federally Recognized Tribal Nations of Utah. I recognize that I am a guest here, with responsibilities—to listen, to act with integrity, and to support Indigenous sovereignty in both word and practice.
— Keolanani Kinghorn, The Rhetorical Review
To access my reviews: https://rhetoricalreview.com/archives/
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