Cheval Theater

Cheval Theater is a Utah stage play company offering original productions and paid cast and crew opportunities for performing arts professionals. The company is organized around genres including medieval, Renaissance, and vintage period work.

How the company is structured

Cheval Theater states that upcoming productions offer paid opportunities to be part of an ensemble cast and crew, and that members of the cast and crew share in some of the production profits. The company also states that participants take turns directing, and in stage and set design and costumery.

That structure — profit participation plus rotating creative roles — is closer to a cooperative ensemble than to a conventional producing theater, and it is a model with a real history in the field. Ensemble companies that rotate leadership tend to attract experienced theater people who want creative agency rather than a single assigned function, and the shared-profit arrangement aligns the whole company with how a production actually performs rather than paying a flat fee regardless.

The company indicates it is looking for participants whose background and experience are in the performing arts, and who are drawn to its genre focus.

Community theater in Southern Utah

Southern Utah has an unusually strong performing arts base for a region of its size, which is part of what makes an ensemble company viable here at all. The Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City is a Tony Award-winning professional repertory operation and has anchored classical theater in the region for decades, drawing both audiences and a steady supply of trained theater professionals to the area. Tuacahn Center for the Arts in Ivins mounts large-scale musicals in an outdoor red-rock amphitheater. St. George supports additional community and university theater through Utah Tech University and several smaller venues.

The practical effect is a deeper local talent pool than the population would suggest — actors, technicians, designers, and costumers who came for seasonal festival work and stayed, alongside retirees with substantial professional backgrounds who relocated to the region and want to keep working. Periods when the major festival seasons are dark leave that talent available, which is exactly the window a smaller company can use.

Period and genre work

Cheval Theater's focus on medieval, Renaissance, and vintage material puts it in a specific corner of the repertoire, and one that is demanding in ways contemporary work is not. Period productions carry heavier design requirements — costuming in particular is a substantial undertaking, and period staging often calls for movement, dialect, or combat skills that not every performer brings. A company where cast and crew take turns handling design and costumery distributes that workload across people who are invested in the outcome.

Southern Utah audiences are also comparatively well-prepared for period material. Decades of the Shakespeare Festival have built a regional audience accustomed to classical and period staging, which is not something a company can assume in most markets of this size.

Contact

Performing arts professionals interested in cast, crew, design, or costume opportunities with Cheval Theater can reach Anne Cheveau at (385) 625-7295 or [email protected].