MURRAY — Mike Todd has a problem he hopes is temporary. His "Big Fat Utah Wedding" has run smack into the holidays.
Suddenly, the hit production that last summer was harder to get into than a Bowl Championship Series game is playing to empty seats.
Mike is the owner of the Desert Star Theater & Restaurant in Murray. For the past 15 years, ever since Mike and his wife, Alyce, founded the dinner theater, the Desert Star has been a significant beacon in made-in-Utah culture. Every couple of months a new production of parody, comedy or satire — sometimes all three — is presented, and people flock to eat, watch and applaud. Whoever said there ain't no culture in Murray has never been to the Desert Star.
Last summer, the Desert Star exceeded its own reputation when it unleashed "My Big Fat Utah Wedding" on an unsuspecting public. Oh my heck, did it take off. Based loosely on the hit sleeper movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" (very loosely, actually; about the only similarities are the title and the fact that a wedding is involved), the play — authored by the Desert Star's artistic director, Scott Holman — manages to tweak more or less everything tweakable in Utah. More remarkably, the tweaking is done tastefully, without a hint of mean-spiritedness. "Saturday's Voyeur" it's not. "My Big Fat Utah Wedding" has about as much nasty aftertaste as green Jell-O.
"We believe it is a show that if you've spent any time at all in Utah you're going to relate to and get a kick out of," says an admittedly biased Mike. "After two hours, you'll walk out feeling better than when you walked in."
The show played to sold-out audiences this past summer, breaking attendance record after attendance record during its scheduled 9 1/2 week run on the Desert Star's main stage. When it finally had to close in mid-August because another play, "Miracle on Main Street Plaza, A Christmas Affair to Remember," was booked and ticketed for the theater, more than 25,000 people had already seen it and another 4,000 people were on the waiting list.
That's when Mike saw the light that he should build another stage. He lopped off more than half of the capacity of the Desert Star's stand-alone restaurant and turned it into a permanent venue for "My Big Fat Utah Wedding," envisioning that by the time everyone who has spent any time at all in Utah has seen it, the investment will have paid off many times over and "My Big Fat Utah Wedding" will be Utah's long-running answer to "The Mousetrap."
Building the new stage took time, though, and by the time "My Big Fat Utah Wedding" was ready for its second debut, it was already October.
"We lost our momentum," says Mike, sounding a lot like a football coach. "Ever since, we've been trying to get it back."
The arrival of the holiday season has not helped. The producers have tried to add a holiday touch to the show by calling it "My Big Fat Utah Christmas Wedding" and having it take place at Christmastime, but even Mike admits, "it's really no more of a Christmas show than 'The Wizard of Oz.'
"Our goal is to extend it to January and then hope it really catches on again," he says.
As anyone familiar with the fickleness of show business knows, that may or may not happen. In the meantime, "My Big Fat Utah Wedding" is playing to something unheard of last summer — empty dinner settings. Freakin' heck, the holidays are a good time to avoid the crowds.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.