18 minute read
NEWS
THEATER All in the Family
A six-year collaboration culminates in Different’s musical story of a special-needs youth.
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BY SCOTT RENSHAW scottr@cityweekly.net @scottrenshaw
If you’re inclined to see things from a perspective of fate, destiny or a divine hand, there’s something perfect about the six-year journey of creating Different: The Musical culminating in its premiere this week. The timing that required coordinating available theater space and the impending relocation of the director also coincided with Rick Daynes dropping off his son and Different’s co-creator Tyler at BYU for his freshman year of college— something that Rick might have considered impossible a decade ago, when Tyler was kicked out of his special program for children with autism as a first-grader.
“He has had this amazing growth,” Rick says by phone from his home in San Diego. “When people find out he got into BYU— not in a special-needs program, just got in—they’re amazed.”
The development of Different has been a huge part of that growth, according to Rick. Inspired by Tyler’s own experiences, it’s the story of a high-school student with autism named Henry, who feels isolated by his neuro-difference until he’s befriended by another special-needs student, and finds a “tribe” of sorts called the “Best Buddies.”
While the Daynes family lives in California, the premiere of Different in Utah marks a full circle of sorts, since the concept was also born here. “We were at Brian Head, on a family ski vacation, six years ago,” Rick recalls. “We were on a ski lift, and [Taylor] said, ‘Dad, I know what I want to do: I want to write a musical.’ I said, ‘Sure, you go do that.’ I was sure it would be one of those fleeting ideas of his.”
The idea kept coming up over the course of the ensuing year, however, and Tyler mentioned it again on the next year’s Utah ski trip, when Tyler was then in 8th grade. “He still wanted to do it, so we started breaking down the ideas, the plot,” Rick says.
The project became quite a family affair, beyond the collaboration between Rick and Tyler. Rick’s niece Samantha Daynes, then a theater student at BYU but soon to move to Virginia, came on board to provide her expertise and to direct the show; Tyler’s older brother, Jefferson, wrote the songs. And not surprising for any endeavor when a bunch of family members work together on something, it was both a pleasure and a challenge.
“There were definitely smooth-sailing times, when characters and ideas just flowed; we’d all laugh and have these great moments,” Rick says. “But there’s three writers, and one of them has autism. And some of his ideas are just out in space, and you’d have to say, ‘Maybe we change this or change that because it’s not going to appeal to people.’ It’s his story, so we’re trying to give as much validity to that as we possibly can, but sometimes we just had to reel him in. So there were knock-down drag-outs, there were tears, there was anger, but then we’d just come together and say, ‘Let’s do this for now, and come back to it.’”
Rick describes the development process as on-and-off over those first few years, taking long enough that the protagonist who was initially conceived as a middleschooler was shifted to Tyler’s own experience as a high-school student. It wasn’t until the pandemic lockdown of 2020, when the family was taking isolation quite seriously due to a high-risk family member, that Rick says, “that forced us to buckle down and get it done.”
“Done” is a relative term in this case, Rick acknowledges, because this first full production of Different—after a few readings for an audience—is being viewed as an opportunity to learn even more about its strengths and areas for improvement. “I’ve never written a musical; [Samantha] was the only pro,” he says. “The venue is a small theater, and we’re really hoping to get audience feedback from it. We’re not set on anything, and everything can change. We want something that’s going to sound out a message of inclusion and acceptance and love, and we’re going to do whatever we can to make that better.”
That idea of providing a sense of hope is central to Different, something Rick has been pursuing in sharing his family’s story ever since he turned it into a book in 2016, Keep It Together Man. “Ever since we did that, there’s nothing too personal for us to share,” Rick says. “A lot of specialneeds families are private; they go home and don’t share their struggles with anyone else. But we find that it’s empowering. I don’t think there’s anything too personal that we wouldn’t share it.”
And now, the family can also share the sense of pride that comes with putting Different out into the world, and sending Tyler out into the world, too. “It has been such a rewarding project to do with my son,” Rick says. “Confidence is everything for teenagers, so I wanted to build confidence and independence for my kids, and this was just a really great project that did that.” CW
The cast of Different: The Musical
DIFFERENT: THE MUSICAL Hive Collaborative Theater 290 W. 600 South, Provo Aug. 24 – 26, 7:30 p.m. Aug. 27, 2 p.m. & 7:30 p.m. $10 general admission Streaming performances Aug. 27, $5 Sensory-friendly performance Thursday, Aug. 25 differentmusical.com
On the Hunt(sman)
Salt Lake Tribune chairman Paul Huntsman claimed newspaper was ‘compromised’ after he launched private investigations unit.
BY KATHARINE BIELE comments@cityweekly.net
Paul Huntsman was not happy—and he was ready to act. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak, Huntsman, chairman of the now-nonprofit Salt Lake Tribune, has publicly disparaged the reporters he employed after he launched his own investigatory unit outside the Tribune newsroom. It reportedly was not going well.
In defending his actions, Huntsman raised claims of a “compromised” Tribune under former editor Jennifer Napier-Pearce—now spokeswoman for Gov. Spencer Cox—and suggested that editors and reporters there had failed to properly report on inappropriate private-sector contracting related to the state government’s COVID-19 response and the TestUtah program operated by NOMI Health.
Utah wanted to handle COVID quickly, to be ahead of the curve responding to an admittedly confusing—if not terrifying—time for the public. And Utah is a libertarianleaning state, where government intervention and mandates are considered anathema. In keeping with conservative values, the state turned to private-sector businesses for answers—in this case, to businesses lacking critical experience.
The Salt Lake Tribune has been fortunate to have a sports-reporter-turned-statistics-wonk in Andy Larsen, who exhaustively followed COVID numbers while they escalated. But the questions both the paper and Huntsman wanted answered weren’t so much about case counts and hospitalization rates as they were about the efficacy of COVID tests, particularly as thenPresident Donald Trump touted unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Utah literally bought into that messaging, buying $800,000 worth of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine and, for a time, looking at buying millions of dollars more.
Tribune reporting on the topic won local journalism awards for exposing lax contracting standards, lapses in oversight and failures at both the government and private-sector levels. But perhaps most stunning were later assertions by Huntsman that he didn’t trust the Trib to “do journalism,” which arrived against the backdrop of Huntsman’s brother—the former Utah governor and U.S. ambassador, Jon Huntsman Jr.—failing to win the 2020 gubernatorial race against Cox, NapierPearce’s new employer.
In July, USA Today reported that the Trib staff was told how disappointed Huntsman was in the newspaper’s coverage of the startup, Nomi Health, and its subcontractors. According to a source quoted in the article, Huntsman felt the Trib was not “aggressively covering alleged cronyism, pay-to-play, abuse of power, conflicts of interest and no-bid contracts being awarded to friends of Republican politicians.”
The criticisms did not go over well with Napier-Pearce, the Tribune’s former editor, who said she “consistently encouraged rigorous reporting about the 2020 gubernatorial campaigns, supported public records requests and publicly praised Tribune reporters who broke numerous stories about the state’s pandemic response.”
Current and former Salt Lake Tribune employees have taken to social media to defend the newspaper against Paul Huntsman, chairman of the paper’s board.
Good Intentions
Napier-Pearce left the Tribune in 2020 after she and Huntsman reportedly came to loggerheads over news coverage. It has never been clear what those disputes entailed, but Napier-Pearce leaving the Tribune before joining the Cox administration may have been a bridge too far for Huntsman, connecting dots to his brother’s political rival.
So while local media outlets continued to focus on the testing companies and government contracting, Huntsman began shining an unwelcome light on the internal intrigue at the Tribune.
“Over the past 14 months, I submitted 400 public records petitions in four states for documents that confirmed what on the surface looked to be, at best, a lousy political operation to rescue reputations and companies or, at worst, a deliberate attempt to push a Chinese-originated [COVID] test,” Huntsman wrote in a March Op-Ed for The Tribune.
The Tribune’s current editor and staff have pushed back against Huntsman’s categorizations of their news coverage. And critics also question the atypical way that Huntsman has pursued his investigations against the state.
More recently, USA Today ran an in-depth story investigating Nomi Health, the company at the center of the embattled TestUtah program that Huntsman has targeted.
Silicon Slopes executive director Clint Betts joined the inaugural nonprofit Tribune board during
the COVID crisis. He had something to offer—a knack for mobilizing. “We bring the tech and business community together to discuss what’s happening in the state,” he said of his work with Silicon Slopes. “It was not random that we’d be holding town halls on the biggest issue facing our state.”
As COVID proliferated, Betts rallied a group of state lawmakers, then-state epidemiologist Angela Dunn and the editor of the Tribune to hash over the pandemic problems. And some joined in an effort to launch TestUtah after the state decided to outsource the work of testing.
“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s cool, it sounds like testing is needed,’” Betts says. As a facilitator, he didn’t really think anyone was going to make money from testing. Then he got texts from a lot of people who said he was wrong.
Betts was perhaps emblematic of good intentions gone wrong. In April of 2020, none other than then-U.S. Vice President Mike Pence began touting the testing startup Betts had promoted.
“I didn’t know. I was there to promote the initiative and let people know this thing was happening and testing was expanding,” he said. “It seemed to me that TestUtah was doing well. … I shouldn’t have said that for a variety of reasons. I’m not part of these companies. I’m a nonprofit organization. We do events and media stuff around the tech community.”
Before long, Tribune reporting and that of other outlets had begun to poke holes in the stories of TestUtah’s success. But things apparently weren’t moving fast enough for Huntsman, who in March 2021 created his own investigations firm, which for reasons unknown was given the name “Jittai,” a Japanese word meaning “substance.” Through Jittai, Huntsman and partners spent at least $1 million to investigate NOMI, mostly through public records requests, according to USA Today.
Breaking Newsroom
Tribune executive editor Lauren Gustus referred City Weekly to her comments in USA Today, saying that the newsroom “independently verified all documents from Jittai that were used for its COVID-19 coverage.”
City Weekly also attempted to contact Huntsman, who did not respond. “As I understand it, Paul is not planning to make any additional comments on the matter,” Gustus said in an email.
Gustus was vocal in defending the Trib’s reporting in the face of disparagement from its chairman and largest donor. “Our independent reporting is unmatched in Utah, and our reporters will continue to seek out truth and break stories related to this and other issues important to our readers,” USA Today quoted her saying.
Once Huntsman’s antipathy for his newsroom became public, Twitter lit up. Betts put out this tweet: “He says the paper was ‘compromised’ because [Napier-Pearce] was the executive editor of the paper. So far, I haven’t seen a single [Tribune] reporter stand up for Jennifer or the work they put out during this period. Why? Do Lauren and the staff agree? Was the paper compromised?”
Then came Trib editorial columnist and attorney Michelle Quist: “I’ll stand up for [Napier-Pearce] all day long.”
Next, former Tribune reporter Matthew LaPlante—who now teaches journalism at Utah State University—tweeted: “I’ve long warned my students that, if they pursue this career, they will face a barrage of attacks on their ethics and integrity. I’ve never warned them those attacks might come from the people who employ them. I shouldn’t have to.”
Matt Canham, another former Trib reporter and editor now at The Seattle Times, weighed in, too: “Paul Huntsman is wrong and his recent statements about The Salt Lake Tribune are appalling. To have the board chairman question the commitment, talent and ethics of Tribune reporters and editors crosses the line. I’m proud of the Trib’s coverage of TestUtah and the 2020 governor’s race. The team stepped up, did their jobs and reported aggressively. [The Tribune] deserves a chairman who believes in journalism and supports journalists. It deserves better than Paul Huntsman.”
Betts, who stayed with the inaugural Tribune board for only a year, said he still has deep respect for the Tribune. He also has questions.
Betts said the Tribune board never knew about Jittai, although the newsroom must have. And Gustus did say reporters were independently verifying Jittai’s findings before publication.
Betts said he stands by the Tribune’s newsroom and believes in its integrity. But like the public, the readers and— probably—the Tribune newsroom’s reporters, he wonders if Huntsman truly believes his staff wasn’t up to the job or if he was looking for payback after Cox won election.
Questions aside, the fact remains that the man who may have saved The Salt Lake Tribune doesn’t trust it. CW
Ticket to Ride
Free transit for Salt Lake City School District students and staff begins this fall.
BY BENJAMIN WOOD bwood@cityweekly.net
With multiple children of her own, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said she understands the time, cost and effort involved in getting kids around town.
But under a new pilot program beginning this fall, students and employees of the Salt Lake City School District will have the option to ride public transit for free—not just to and from schools, but also for part-time jobs and internships, doctor’s appointments and errands, parks and museums or to virtually any other destination served by the Utah Transit Authority (UTA).
Mendenhall—speaking at a press event earlier this month—said city, school and transit leaders have been discussing the idea of free student fares for roughly a decade. The average city resident spends 20% of their income on transportation, she said, which leads too many families to say “no” to opportunities and activities as the cost of living rises.
“It was such a big undertaking that it took the right moment, the right group of people and a financial commitment, beyond what we’ve done before, from your capital city,” Mendenhall said. “This is a group that sees hiccups, figures them out and keeps going. The buses are literally rolling ahead, the trains are rolling, because we aren’t going to stop trying to figure out what should be happening”
Hop on the Bus, Gus
Under the program, students and staff will receive an individual, physical transit pass providing access to buses, TRAX light rail and UTA’s ondemand service (only available on the west side), comparable to the Hive Pass that for years has been available to city residents at a discounted rate. Premium UTA services like Frontrunner and ski resort shuttles will not be included with the school passes, but will be available to passholders at a discounted, supplemental charge.
James Yapias, director of the Salt Lake Education Foundation, told City Weekly it will be up to local school administrators to hand out the passes this fall. He said the foundation is working with the district to establish the process for assigning and distributing cards to individual students and staff, as well as for replacing those that are inevitably misplaced.
And while it is expected that the program will continue, the district and UTA have so far committed only to a one-year pilot, at a cost of roughly $379,000 paid in concert by the city council, the school district and the education foundation.
“I think we all want the same results—that is access for low-income families so they are able to save some money with inflation, on the cost of gas and with all these other issues,” Yapias said.
Utah public transit has increasingly taken on a mainstream role in recent years, particularly in the core Salt Lake City service area.
In February, UTA eliminated fares systemwide for the entire month in partnership with the city and in response to Utah’s winter inversion, which sees car exhaust and other contaminants trapped under a lid of cold air. And in the past month, UTA has opened a new TRAX station in Salt Lake City and a new Frontrunner station in Vineyard, each the first of their kind in roughly a decade.
Overall transit ridership numbers are still below pre-COVID levels, according to UTA spokesman Carl Arky. But he added that ridership is trending upward and increasingly shows a shift in the way Utahns are using transit, from a two-way commuter service for weekday workers to one that moves riders to a breadth of destinations for any number of activities throughout the week.
He suggested the new pilot program could bolster those trends and lead to improved services by highlighting the ways that children and their families use the transit network as it’s made more accessible.
Partnerships between Salt Lake City and the Utah Transit Authority have led to new service routes, a new Trax station and, now, free fares for students and teachers.
Hit the Road, Jack
While UTA offers several pass programs for frequent transit riders, the agency has also leaned into free-fare partnerships, with concert and event tickets as well as airport boarding passes regularly doubling as a person’s transit fare.
But with the new school district program, more than 20,000 people will now be eligible for ongoing free service—or roughly 10% of the city’s total population.
School board president Melissa Ford said the program has the potential to be “life-changing” for many families, easing the bottom line of budgets by reducing the need for private automobiles and gas purchases.
She suggested there are both short- and long-term benefits to encouraging Salt Lakers to get out of their cars and onto public transit, particularly for younger residents who are otherwise limited in their ability to navigate the city.
“We are making an impact on our air quality now and also drawing in future, lifelong UTA riders,” Ford said.
Yapias, of the Salt Lake Education Foundation, emphasized that the intention of the pilot is not to diminish or supplant the district’s traditional bus fleet. In addition to running morning and afternoon routes, yellow school buses are regularly used by districts for field trips and extracurricular activities.
But if the UTA pilot were to succeed and continue, it could lead to new ways of thinking about and utilizing school district vehicles.
Similarly, Arky said it’s difficult to predict how the student fare program in Salt Lake could ripple out and affect transit services for Utah children and families, generally.
He said other school districts in the county have expressed interest in pursuing their own versions of the pilot, and conversations are ongoing with city and state leaders around the potential for Free Fare February to be repeated, revised or expanded.
“Hopefully, it won’t take that long to get other school districts on board,” Arky said, “but it does take a financial commitment.” CW
