LOGAN – With the opening of their 2025 summer season just days away, the members of the artistic and production teams of the Lyric Repertory Company are already looking forward to summer of 2026.
At a gala launch party for their upcoming season at the Logan Golf & County Club on June 7, they also announced the play selections for 2026.
The shows to be staged by the local professional theater company in 2026 will include the musical review Forever Plaid; a reprise of the musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; the magical comedy Puffs; Gutenberg! the Musical! and the delightful Noël Coward comedy Blythe Spirit.
After a one-year hiatus, the 2026 Lyric season is also expected to mark the return of the troupe to performing in downtown Logan at the Caine Lyric Theatre, according to Leslie Brott, a performing arts professor at Utah State University.
Brott explained that demolition of the downtown theater’s seismically threatened stage house will begin shortly and is scheduled to be completed in March of 2026, allowing the Lyric Rep to celebrate its 60th season in its traditional home.
Forever Plaid is a tribute to the clean-cut, close-harmony guy groups that dominated America’s radio airwaves prior to the game-changing British Invasion. Originally performed off-Broadway, the show resurrects ghostly high-school chums who return from the afterlife for the farewell concert they never performed.
The four-member cast of Forever Plaid will breathe life into mostly forgotten pop music hits of the 1950’s like “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “No, Not Much,” “Rags to Riches,” “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing” and many others.
After closing out the 2025-26 USU Performing Arts season with a student production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, director Vanessa Ballam will remount that musical for Lyric audiences next summer.
Based on the 1964 children’s novel by Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was adapted for the stage by the composing team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Whittman.
The familiar musical centers on a poor boy named Charlie and his confusing relationship to the famous chocolatier Willy Wonka, who has stashed five golden tickets in his Wonka bars throughout the world.
Next in the Lyric line-up for 2026 will be Puffs, or Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic.
If that sounds suspiciously familiar, that’s because it’s intended to be without getting playwright Matt Cox sued by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling for copyright infringement.
Puffs is told from the perspective of losers and also-rans at the unnamed magic school who eventually find their own self-worth despite matriculating in the shadow of the famously scarred young wizard.
Gutenberg! the Musical! is a 2006 Off-Broadway musical written and composed by Scott Brown and Anthony King.
The show features two deadly earnest but clueless theater nerds who present a highly inaccurate musical about the life of Renaissance printer Johannes Gutenberg to potential investors, based on a single, brief Google search.
Because the minimally talented and starry-eyed authors do not have a cast or an orchestra, they play all of the roles themselves, wearing hats with the various characters’ names on them.
Finally, the Lyric troupe will stage the charming Noël Coward comedy Blythe Spirit.
In this amusing romp by the noted British playwright, a séance goes delightfully wrong, ending a cynical novelist’s writer’s block but also allowing the ghost of his late wife to haunt his English county home.
The Lyric Repertory Company’s 2025 season will debut on Friday, June 13 with the bluegrass musical Bright Star. The show will be staged in the Morgan Theatre in the Chase Fine Arts Center on the USU campus.