Broadway favorite Sutton Foster performing at BYU

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Two-time Tony Award winner Sutton Foster will make her first BYU concert appearance Sept. 5-6. Photo/Laura Marie Duncan
Two-time Tony Award winner Sutton Foster will make her first BYU concert appearance Sept. 5-6. Photo/Laura Marie Duncan

Two-time Tony Award-winner Sutton Foster will perform two concerts at BYU this week.

Foster is a renowned Broadway and TV performer. Cultivating her audience with incredible talent and a unique charm, Foster will bring excitement to BYU Friday and Saturday, Sept. 5 and 6.

“I am really excited because I have a lot of ties (here). I just love Utah,” Foster told The Universe.

Partnering with long-time friend and Broadway co-star Megan McGinnis, Foster hopes to create a quirky, yet intimate setting.

“Hopefully the audience will leave thinking, ‘Hey, I just got to hang out with Sutton’ as opposed to watching me play a bunch of different characters,” Foster said.

Foster plans to perform not only some of her hits from Broadway shows, like “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “Anything Goes” and “The Drowsy Chaperone,” but also songs from her first solo album, “An Evening With Sutton Foster: Live at the Café Carlyle.”

“It’s an opportunity for me as a performer to show audiences a more intimate side of me,” Foster said. “We’ll be singing songs from shows I’ve done, but it’s also a way to show audiences what it is I like to sing and how I want to represent.”

Foster is also working on her second solo album with her musical producer, Michael Rafter.

“I’m not all sequences, but I’m just a normal person. I want to feel like we’re just hanging out in my living room,” Foster said. “It’s more stripped down, more vulnerable. And that’s scary, but it’s more exciting.”

This is Foster’s first time visiting BYU, and she welcomes the atmosphere with a willing and respectful heart.

“We are working really hard to make sure we honor everything (BYU is) about and stands for,” Foster said. “I have so much love and respect (for the school), and it’s so important. I really want to honor that.”

Foster said she loves performing for university audiences because they bring a more energetic crowd. Foster will teach a master class for BYU’s Music Dance Theatre Division students during her visit.

“As a kid I had a lot of exuberance, a lot of energy, a lot of tenacity,” Foster said,. “Every 15-year-old thinks they know everything. And I had some hard times when I was younger learning the hard way. And I wish I could go back and say, ‘Keep quiet, listen and just learn.’ Because you never stop doing that.”

Immediately following the BYU performances, Foster will fly to New York to begin working on “Younger,” a new sitcom produced by Darren Star, which has her using her youthful looks to play a 40-year-old single mother posing as a 26-year-old.

Foster refuses to sit still as she’s additionally preparing for an October wedding and a January art show in Los Angeles.

“I feel like I have an eight-burner stove. And I’ve got all these things on the stove, and things are on the back burner, and they got to get moved to the front burner,” Foster said. “And I’m trying to keep everything from burning and making sure everything gets cooked. So I have all these things that I’m trying to navigate; but I love it, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Foster hinted at another Broadway show in the works, with hopes that she can continue balancing her Broadway, TV and solo acts.

Foster will be coming to campus at the beginning of BYU’s “BRAVO!” series.

“We always look for top-notch performers who currently work in the field to open our ‘BRAVO!’ show, and Sutton fit the bill perfectly,” said Jeff Martin, program director of “BRAVO!”

“BRAVO!” features an elite group of theatrical luminaries performing at BYU throughout the year.

The performances will take place in the de Jong Concert Hall Sept. 5 and 6 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are on sale for $35 each. Students get $10 off with a BYU ID. Senior citizens and BYU alumni get $3 off. Martin said he expects both shows to sell out.

Tickets can be purchased online at arts.byu.edu/events/an-evening-with-sutton-foster-2.

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