Take a look inside the Mid-Valley Performing Arts Center, Salt Lake County's new 'jewel' venue for homegrown arts groups

Salt Lake County’s newest arts venue, the Mid-Valley Performing Arts Center, is a beautiful building, inside and out — with a full theater auditorium, black box theater space and a huge rehearsal area / meeting hall.

What’s unusual about it is that it’s not in downtown Salt Lake City — where the county’s other arts venues (Abravanel Hall, Capitol Theatre, Eccles Theater and Rose Wagner Center for the Performing Arts) are located. This $45 million “jewel” is in Taylorsville, on the county’s west side, and equidistant between the county’s twin population centers of Salt Lake City to the north and Sandy/Draper to the south.

I talked with the folks who will operate this new venue, and to people from some of the arts groups hoping to make it their new home.

Read the story at sltrib.com.

Mette Ivie Harrison, Utah mystery novelist, talks about two faith journeys: Her own, and the one taken by her fictional suburban detective

Author Mette Ivie Harrison writes mystery novels, but in some ways the biggest mystery in her books is about faith.

Her detective, Linda Wallheim, is a suburban Salt Lake City wife and mom, raised in the faith of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — for which her husband, Kurt, is a bishop, a position of respect and authority in their local ward. But as she noses around in crimes in her supposedly picture-perfect community, she learns things that makes her question her faith.

In the fifth book in the Linda Wallheim series, “The Prodigal Daughter,” Linda is asked to help find a runaway teen girl who’s living on the streets in Salt Lake City. Meeting the girl, Sabrina, causes Linda to encounter homelessness, and confront the way the male domination of her faith leaves makes victims of women and girls.

I talked with Harrison about the book, and her own issues with the Latter-day Saint faith in which she was raised but no longer practices. The venue for the interview was the downtown neighborhood where much of her book’s action takes place.

Read it here at sltrib.com.

COVID-19 in Utah, continued: The vaccine and the variants

This stage of the COVID-19 pandemic has been described as “a race between the vaccine and the variants.”

On the one hand, the vaccines — the double-shot versions by Pfizer and Moderna, and the single-shot Johnson & Johnson variety, back this week after a “pause” ordered by federal officials because of a rare side effect of blood clots — are more widely available than ever.

On the other hand, variants of the virus — first tracked in the United Kingdom, California, South Africa and Brazil, among other places — are making the disease more slippery, spreading faster than before.

In Utah, Gov. Spencer Cox this week noted that the state has hit “a clear plateau” in what had been a declining level of case counts. Also in April, Cox has also touted the fact that more people in Utah’s ethnic minority communities have been receiving the vaccine than ever before, though statistically those groups are still lagging behind the rest of the state. (I talked to members of some of those groups in mid-March.)

My Salt Lake Tribune colleagues and I have been covering all of this — you should really check out our work — as we have passed into what Utah legislators called the “endgame.”

The first noticeable change brought by the Utah Legislature was that on April 10, the statewide order that said people should wear face masks in indoor public places was lifted. Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall kept a citywide mask mandate in place, though. So did a good many private businesses and organizations, which health experts said was still a good idea. And public schools will keep their mask rules in place to the end of the school year.

Here’s what else I’ve written about COVID-19 in the last few weeks:

• The first clinical trials to figure out how to give the COVID-19 vaccine to kids have started, some of them in Utah. I talked to one Utah family whose children were eager to be the first kids in Utah to get the shots.

• On the other end of the age spectrum, the proliferation of the vaccine among Utah’s elderly population has meant many nursing homes and long-term care facilities have been allowed to loosen their restrictions on contact with loved ones.

• Research into COVID-19 continued in Utah: A study that found that one’s blood type doesn’t change how likely they are to catch the virus; another explored the link between COVID-19 and a particular form of stroke; and another found teens and young adults more likely to catch the coronavirus than older adults, a contradiction to earlier wisdom. Meanwhile, doctors also warned that mental health issues were becoming a “second pandemic” during the year of COVID-19.

• Utahns told us what side effects they felt after getting the first dose and second dose of the vaccine.

• The Eccles Theater announced its plans to reopen. So did the Salt Lake City public library system. And the major concert venues in and around Salt Lake City are scheduling a fairly busy summer.

Oscar predictions: Who will probably win, and who I would have voted for

The 93rd annual Academy Awards will be handed out Sunday, April 25, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Union Station in Los Angeles, and possibly some other remote sites — capping off one of the strangest years in moviegoing, because where wasn’t a lot of “going.”

Instead, there was a lot of staying in during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the movie studios accommodated by shifting their films to streaming platforms — Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, and so on. The big blockbusters, though, sat on the shelf, waiting for a time when we could go back safely into movie theaters, spend money at the box office and eat copious amounts of popcorn, the way we used to do.

There were a lot of quality films for Academy voters to process, and both they and regular moviegoers had more chances to do so from the comfort of their own homes. So picking favorites for this year’s Oscars should be easy, right? We’ll find out — and I’ll see if my predictions, published in The Salt Lake Tribune, hold up.

Lila Weller, matriarch of Salt Lake City's Weller bookstore and an employee for 70-some years, dies at 105

I got to meet Lila Weller a year and a half ago, when the family bookstore where she was the matriarch — Weller Book Works in Trolley Square — celebrated its 90th anniversary. She was 103 then, and still worked at the store, checking inventory and being wise counsel to her son, Tony, and his wife, Catherine, who run the store.

Lila first started working at the store in the 1950s, when she met Sam Weller — who took over the business from his father, Gus, when Sam returned home from serving in World War II. Lila did the bookkeeping, devised her own inventory system for the pre-computer age, and provided a level head when Sam needed one.

The pandemic forced Lila to stay home, where she was “just bored,” Catherine Weller told me last August.

On April 15, Lila Weller died at her Salt Lake City home, at age 105. Here’s what I wrote for her obituary for The Salt Lake Tribune, based on the store’s history and on my meeting her and the family in 2019.

Utah arts groups announce their fall plans, with season slates and a changed roster of performers.

Spring is the season of renewal — which sometimes means renewing one’s subscriptions to various local arts groups, which is why it’s the time those groups announce their fall plans.

Here are stories I’ve written recently about the 2021-2022 plans for Pioneer Theatre Company, Utah Symphony and Utah Opera.

I also wrote about the changes in the company line-up at Ballet West. The interesting thing here is that the troupe has promoted its first non-Asian dancers of color, a Black ballerina and a Brazilian male dancer, to the top level of principal dancer.

A year of COVID-19: Asking experts and readers 'What lessons will we carry forward?,' and compiling a timeline of how Utah reacted to the pandemic

Sometimes it feels like an instant. Sometimes it feels like a decade.

Yes, the Utah Department of Health confirmed the state’s first case of COVID-19 on March 6, 2020 — one year ago Saturday.

On Thursday, it will be one year since Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive before a game against the Oklahoma City Thunder — leading to the cancellation of that game, and then pretty near every other group gathering or event across the country for months on end.

In Sunday’s Salt Lake Tribune, I ask the question: What have we learned from a year of COVID-19? And what will we carry over from this year into the future?

I asked the experts, who said, among other things, that face masks would be a good thing to keep around. And I got comments from Tribune readers about what they noticed in their lives this year.

And, if you’re feeling nostalgic or just need to process what just happened, The Tribune has an interactive timeline detailing what happened in the last 12 months. (I wrote the text, and my colleague Christopher Cherrington did the heavy lifting of making it work online.)

I urge everyone to read all the stories my Tribune colleagues and I have written about COVID-19. They’re easy to find: Just go to sltrib.com/coronavirus.

——

It’s been a couple months since I compiled all of my COVID-19 stories on this site, so here’s a round-up of what I’ve been doing:

• The University of Utah’s first COVID-19 patient is, they believe, a 75-year-old Californian whose son works as a doctor at University of Utah Hospital. Here is his story.

• Last week, the Utah Department of Health announced 14 new mass vaccination sites — teaming up with Intermountain Healthcare, University of Utah Health and Nomi Health. Here’s where those sites are located.

• I’ve sat in on Gov. Spencer Cox’s Thursday COVID-19 briefings. This week, Cox announced the minimum age to be eligible for a vaccination dropped to 50. (Personal note: That means I was able to get my first dose of the Moderna vaccine on Friday.) The week before, Cox stressed the need for volunteers to staff the state’s mass vaccination sites.

• Let the music play! Salt Lake County announced it would reopen its four downtown Salt Lake City arts venues on March 24.

• News from the medical front: Doctors warn people not to let COVID-19 precautions keep them from getting critical care; a pediatrician reports that pediatric flu and RSV, two viruses that usually hit children hard in the winter, are practically nonexistent this year, in part because we’re all wearing masks; and experts say that women should postpone routine mammograms if they’ve had the COVID-19 vaccine, because of a side effect that can mimic a symptom of breast cancer.

• As Salt Lake City’s schools reopen to in-person classes, don’t expect a big surge in cases, experts say.

• An explanation of how the Utah Department of Health was changing the way it counts the test positivity rate — the measure of how far the virus is spreading. Here’s a story from January that explains why the rate matters.

• Intermountain Healthcare marked its millionth COVID-19 test, and how the hospital system ramped up from 14 tests a day to thousands a day.

• Utah’s Primary Children’s Hospital takes the co-lead in a national study of how a mystery illness affects children after they recover from COVID-19.

• A University of Utah study looks at the challenges front-line health care workers face to their mental health.

• Saying goodbye to two Utahns who died from COVID-19: Rufino Rodriguez, a respiratory therapist who died in the same Provo hospital where he worked; and Courtney Isaiah Smith, a gifted keyboardist who was co-founder of Salt Lake City’s Jazz Vespers Quartet and chief pianist for Calvary Baptist Church.

Lee Isaac Chung, writer-director of award-winning film 'Minari,' talks about putting his childhood on film, being an Oscar contender, and what he learned at the University of Utah

Lee Isaac Chung was born in Denver, grew up in Arkansas, went to college at Yale, and is now a filmmaker based in Los Angeles.

But we in Utah can claim Chung — writer-director of the immigrant drama “Minari” — as one of its own, because he went to film school as a graduate student at the University of Utah.

“I loved how close the mountains were and just the life there was pretty quiet and nice, a good place to focus on film,” Chung said in an interview I did with him last month for The Salt Lake Tribune.

“Minari” won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and went on to win the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film. (Yeah, about that — even though the movie was made in the United States, and is very much a story about immigrants adjusting to their new lives in America, because it’s largely in Korean, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association punted it into the foreign-language category.) It also was chosen the year’s best movie by the Utah Film Critics Association, of which I’m a member.

Read my interview with Chung here, at sltrib.com.

COVID-19 in Utah, December 2020: A tragic milestone, and the vaccines start to arrive

The “dark winter” we were warned about has begun in Utah, with a rise in COVID-19 cases and a tragic milestone — 1,000 Utahns dead from the virus — that we blew past without blinking.

I wrote about the state crossing the 1,000 mark in fatalities in a story that posted Dec. 10. The story recalled the lives of some of the people who died, and considered the stresses suffered by morticians and funeral directors who are helping loved ones handle this unexpected and particularly lonely form of dying.

By the end of December, that death toll had risen to 1,269 Utahns. Dec. 31 also marked a new single-day record for COVID-19 cases, with 4,672 people testing positive for the virus.

The good news in December was the arrival of the first vaccines to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In The Salt Lake Tribune, I and my colleagues chronicled the arrival of the first Pfizer vaccine shipments, the first health care workers receiving those doses, the first shipments of the Moderna vaccine, and its distribution to rural hospitals and nursing homes.

I’ve also worked on stories that debunk the myths about who will get the vaccine in the rollout’s Phase 1, and detail the changes to the plans in Phase 2. And I wrote, after a Christmas that had one prominent doctor worried about a case surge, about state officials admitting that the rollout has been slower than they had hoped.

The new year doesn’t mean the COVID-19 pandemic is over. But there are signs of hope that, if the vaccine rollout can speed up, that things will improve. Fingers crossed.

Robert Redford sells Sundance Mountain Resort, the ski area that has been his Utah foothold since the 1960s

In 1961, a young up-and-coming actor Robert Redford and his young wife, Utah native Lola van Wagenen, bought a two-acre plot up in Provo Canyon, near the Timp Haven ski resort. They started to build a cabin there, which would be the Redfords’ home away from New York and Hollywood. As he became a world-famous movie star, Redford said the land was therapeutic. “Other people have analysis, I have Utah,” he would like to say.

In 1969, Redford bought the Timp Haven resort, and renamed it. He chose the name of the character who had made him a star: Sundance.

On Dec. 11, Redford announced that he would sell the Sundance Mountain Resort to a pair of real estate firms, Broadreach Capital Partners and Cedar Capital Partners, that specialize in high-end properties.

Here’s my story on the sale, with interviews with Redford and executives from the two firms, at sltrib.com.