Salt Lake Acting Company has been mounting summer productions filled with music and social satire for decades now—and while some of the details and creative personnel have changed, the foundations of the successful formula haven’t. You’ll get some skewering of local and national politics, served up with a generous helping of musical-theater song parodies and energetic performances. Sometimes it’s savage, sometimes it’s earnest, but at its best it’s a mix of progressive pressure-release-valve and brash cabaret.

The 2024 installment, Close Encounters in the Beehive, mostly sticks to playing the hits, but does so with irresistible enthusiasm. The premise plays with a familiar science-fiction trope, as alien visitors Zeb (Joseph Paul Branca) and Skruuk (Nate Ginsberg) are basically tasked with judging whether humanity deserves to survive, on orders from “Overlord [Elon] Musk.” And glory be, they’ve landed in Utah, posing as missionaries and ingratiating themselves with an LDS family (Melody Baugh, Robert Scott Smith, Alexa Kelly Shaheen and Noelani Brown) to understand our ways.

Needless to say, that concept serves mostly as the armature on which to hang various production numbers, set to re-written showtunes spanning the decades from Gypsy to Annie to Little Shop of Horrors to Legally Blonde to Wicked. And generally speaking, the songs—by the writing team of Olivia Custodio, David Knoell and Penelope Caywood—are winners, finding clever twists to their source material like the stab at conservative-mandated school curricula set to Chicago’s “They Both Reached for the Gun.” That example provides a great sense for how the creative team finds the right tune for the right concept; in this case, Chicago’s original song about people manipulating the system to sell a lie plays perfectly with whitewashed history lessons. And director/choreographer Cynthia Fleming knows how to maximize the theater’s limited stage space for movement that feels big.

The script also shows an understanding for mixing up hot-button topics like the presidential debate—with Smith’s Biden and Marc Nielson’s Trump both terrifically-realized—with lighter subjects of local interest. Close Encounters gets a lot of material out of the Kevin Bacon / Payson High School prom attendance, turning it into a full medley of tunes from the Footloose soundtrack. The writers understand that their first responsibility is to get the audience laughing, and avoid leaning too heavily into the subjects that would just get folks cringing in despair.

There is an attempt to build some actual narrative arcs into the story, and it’s really only here that the production falls a bit flat. Close Encounters tries to get a little serious in the second act, both with a crisis of faith for one of the kids in our LDS family and with the matter of whether humanity really is doomed, and the script feels a bit awkward when it wants to offer a sincere message in which to wrap up the sketches. It’s much more effective when the wonderful cast is simply letting loose with the music, prodding at local culture with a solid balance of annoyance and affection.

SLAC'S SUMMER SHOW: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS IN THE BEEHIVE
168 W. 500 North
Through Aug. 18
saltlakeactingcompany.org