On Thursday night, the lights will go down at the Ideal Playhouse in Heber City and a story that has lived only in one woman's imagination will finally be told out loud. "Whimsy!" — an original fantasy musical written by Midway artist and playwright Susette Gertsch — opens a two-weekend run at 113 North Main Street, and it arrives with a red carpet, an invitation to dress up, and the particular electricity that only a first-ever performance can generate.
The production is presented by Art Around the Square, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to enriching Wasatch County and the Heber Valley through performing and visual arts. It is, by any measure, an ambitious undertaking for a community organization: an entirely new musical, with original music, dance, costumes, staging and special effects, performed by local talent of all ages. It is directed by Laurie Turnblom, who spent years leading the theater department at Wasatch High School before retiring, and who now returns to guide a cast drawn largely from the valley she taught in.
The story at the center of it is a fairy tale with a heroine who is easy to root for. A lost child is found and raised in an enchanted mountain forest by the Raspberry Fairies. She grows into a young adult with a rare gift — light spinning — and a burning need to know who she is. When she answers the call of the wider world, hoping to share her talent with the circus, she steps into the unknown, where mysteries unravel, villains lurk, and surprises pop up at every turn. Along the way she is accompanied by Wild Child. Gertsch has described the musical as "a story of courage, love, and imagination" that "celebrates the creative spark in every heart."
That message, she has said, turned out to matter more than she expected. "I never dreamed Whimsy's message would be so important to young people, but it's so obvious now that we want them to attend for free," Gertsch said. The production has put real weight behind that impulse: youth ages 12 to 18 can attend free using the code WHIMSYHERO at checkout, one per young person, verified at the theater. Children ages 5 to 11 get in for $6 with the code WHIMSYKIDS, and families of four or more can take 30 percent off with WHIMSYFAMILY. All offers are subject to seat availability. Tickets and discount codes are available at WhimsyMusical.com.
The choice of venue is itself part of the story. The Ideal Playhouse was built in 1914 and is one of the oldest theaters in Utah — a building that has been described, with affection, as both the newest and the oldest theater in the state. It was renovated and updated in 2024, reopening as a high-tech, immersive venue with a nostalgic feel, and it now hosts concerts, film screenings, theater productions and community gatherings year-round. Its large LED screen and modern staging are being put to work to bring Whimsy's enchanted forest to life, which means a musical written in the Heber Valley is being staged with tools that would have been unimaginable to the audiences who first filled the seats more than a century ago.
Gertsch herself is a familiar figure in the valley, though more often in connection with a paintbrush than a script. Born in California, she studied at Diablo Valley College — where she sold her first painting and realized, as she put it, "I could do this" — before living in Australia and eventually settling in Utah, where she raised five children and earned both a bachelor's and a master of fine arts degree from Brigham Young University. She taught for 19 years at Skyline High School, and she is proud of the number of students she started on their first involvement with painting. Her paintings hang in homes throughout the Heber Valley, and her truck, parked on Homestead Drive, carries a sign reading "Midway Artist" and an open invitation to visit her gallery in the afternoon. Now that lifelong creative practice has produced something new: a full-length musical, written by a local artist, performed by local people, in a local landmark.
Opening night on Thursday will feature a red-carpet celebration, and audiences are invited to dress for it — elegant evening attire, or costumes drawn from the world of the show. Organizers have specifically welcomed steampunk enthusiasts, fairy-inspired characters, storybook fans and woodland wizards. Themed attire is encouraged but optional at every performance. To keep the atmosphere family-friendly, masks and scary or gory costumes are not permitted.
The run continues Oct. 15 through 17 and Oct. 22 through 24, with evening performances at 7 p.m. and Saturday matinees at 2 p.m. on Oct. 17 and 24 — eight performances in all, with general seating at every show. The production is supported in part by Heber City and Wasatch County TAP tax revenues, Art Around the Square, and community sponsors and donors. Art Around the Square was among the first recipients of Heber City's Arts & Culture TAP tax grants, awarded in 2024 from a voter-approved 0.1 percent sales tax increase in Wasatch County — funding that has since flowed back into exactly this kind of local cultural project.
For Gertsch, the premiere is the culmination of a creative life that began, as she tells it, with a five-year-old drawing on herself in a bunk bed, having built her own personal playground. "Creativity connected me to me," she has said. On Thursday night, in a 1914 playhouse on Main Street, she gets to hand that idea to a new generation — and to a valley that has watched her paint for decades, now watching her story come to life.