Every spring for the past 20 years, when ski lifts stop running, traffic dissipates and local restaurants take a couple weeks to recuperate, the Park City Follies enters the scene.
The Park City Follies is always a sell out and folks know they must buy tickets early if they want to see the popular stage performance which pokes fun at Park City lifestyle, politics and culture. Tom Clyde is MC and one of the co-writers.
“We’re quite a way’s from having things nailed down but that's typical and sort of the nature of the beast. But yeah we're hard at work at it we were shooting videos last summer working on the on the overall script this year.”
In past years, the Follies creators select an overarching theme and build the show around high profile community issues. Clyde says it’s always a gamble when starting the creative process early, never entirely sure the topics will be current in April when the curtain goes up.
“We’ve done housing and transit and over tourism before that was even a term, the hospital, the Vail takeover, schools, realtors, the east side-west side. We’ve pretty well covered Park City from top to bottom through the years. And sometimes I feel like we're a little bit ahead of the curve and little prescient and other times we're catching up with what's going on in town.”
Clyde says they’re planning a variety of vignettes with some familiar characters returning this year.
“The theory was that that was going to be easier to write and we've learned that it's not. Because of the 20th anniversary we're trying to bring back some of the old characters, not repeating skits but bringing back characters from years before. They'll be some people you recognize in it and just trying to have fun with the fact that we've been around for a lot longer than anybody ever intended.”
Clyde says, it’s crunch time and they hope to have the script finished up and out to the actors within a couple of weeks.
“Yeah, it’s been just a wonderful collaboration. Terry Moffitt does just genius work with the songs in the music in it. Paul Tan directs it but is a great contributor all the way through the writing process. Rick Klein does a lot of video work and also a big voice in the writing project and we've got Andy Cier and Josh Mann who are both great contributors on all of it."
Tickets are on sale now. There are nine shows starting Friday, April 24. They’ll perform through May 3 each night except Monday, the 27th. For tickets, go to Park City Shows.com.
