Four cast members from Whose Line spend two nights improvising at the Covey, Mater Dei comes back to Utah County on Saturday, and growers here lost most of a year's fruit to four cold mornings in April
Plus the last two Bluebird nights up the canyon, a silent reading party with warm cookies in American Fork, and why Blackhawk is still shut on the Nebo Loop.
Good morning, Happy Valley.
Friday we sent you to Highland for IMG Academy and hedged that it would get treated like a showcase. It got treated like a scrimmage. IMG won 59-3, Lone Peak turned it over four times, and the Knights are 1-1 with the part of the schedule that counts still ahead of them.
This week is quieter and better. The city celebrations are done, school is in, and what is left is the stuff that was always here: two nights of improv in downtown Provo, a country band on the Orem lawn tonight, a Spanish Fork musical, and one Saturday night when a California program that recruits the whole country pulls into Orem High.
📍 30 seconds in the valley⏱️ 7 min read
- 🎤Whose Live Anyway at the Covey, Thursday and Friday
- 🏈Mater Dei at Orem, Saturday at 7
- 🍑Almost no fruit came off the county's trees this year
⭐ The Big One
Pick of the week Four of the Whose Line cast take the Covey stage two nights running
Ryan Stiles, Greg Proops, Jeff B. Davis and Joel Murray bring the touring version of Whose Line Is It Anyway to the Covey Center's Main Performance Hall on Thursday and Friday, 7:30 both nights. Ninety minutes, no script, and a chunk of it built out of suggestions shouted from the seats.
Audience participation here is not the polite kind. People get called up onto the stage. If that is your idea of a good night out, sit close. If it is your idea of a nightmare, the balcony exists for a reason and it is cheaper.
The Covey sells these at $55 and $65, and it has a warning posted on its own site that it is not affiliated with any third-party ticket seller. Worth reading before you buy: resale listings for these two nights are running $94 in the balcony and up past $110 on the main floor. Same seats, roughly double, and the box office still has its own.
Our take
We would take Thursday. Same cast, same format, and a Thursday house in Provo is looser than a Friday one that half-filled on resale tickets. Buy through covey.provo.gov and you keep the forty dollars the middlemen want.⚠️ Heads up: Improv from this crew goes where it goes. There is no rating on the door and no way to know in advance what a suggestion turns into, so it is not a night for the nine-year-old.
$$ comedydate nightProvo
📰 Around the Valley
Utah County's orchards lost most of a year to four mornings in April
The reason the peach tables have been thin all summer is four cold mornings last spring. Utah came out of its warmest winter since records began in 1895, averaging around 40 degrees, and the trees read that as a green light and bloomed early. Then April dropped below 26 degrees for more than eight hours on four separate mornings and killed roughly 90 percent of the flowers and young fruit. Tart cherries and apples took it worst, with peaches, pluots and the row crops behind them. Growers are calling it the worst year since the early 1970s, and the farms that came through it mostly did so on the money from stands, tours and everything that is not the fruit itself.
A new fire started Sunday afternoon on the west side of the county
Crews were called out Sunday afternoon to a fire burning west of Tunnel Road, about five miles southwest of Elberta. It was reported just before three and estimated at 20 to 30 acres by late afternoon, with both ground crews and aircraft working it. Officials had not put out a containment number or said whether any structures were in the way. It lands in a summer that has already run the state's firefighting bill past $200 million, and forest managers currently rate fire danger in the Wasatch as very high.
📅 This Week
Music
Worth it 🎤 Diamond Rio plays the Orem lawn tonight, and gates are two hours early
The Grammy-winning country band that put seven singles at number one is on the SCERA Shell stage tonight at eight. General admission is lawn seating and gates open at 6:30, which is the whole trick to this venue: the people who show at 7:55 are the people standing at the back.
Our take
A Monday night show is a strange thing for a band this size, and it works in your favor. Forty dollars on the grass for a group with twenty top-ten singles is the cheapest ticket of the week that anybody will actually sing along to.⚠️ Heads up: Reserved sections A and B and the floor are the only assigned seats. Everything else is first come, which is why the 6:30 number matters more than the 8 o'clock one.
$$ country musicoutdoorOrem
Football
Book now 🏈 Mater Dei already beat one Utah County team this month. Orem is next.
Mater Dei of Santa Ana flies back into the valley Saturday night to play Orem at seven. They were here three days before our last issue, took American Fork apart 31-11, and turned around to do it again. Five national championships hang on that program's wall.
Our take
Two weeks ago you could have watched this team in American Fork and most of us did not. That is the whole argument. A program that recruits nationally does not schedule Utah County twice in a month very often.⚠️ Heads up: American Fork lost by twenty and that was with a full week of prep. Go for the game, not the scoreboard.
$ footballSaturday nightOrem
Theater
Worth it 🎭 A new musical about a man racing a machine has three nights left in Spanish Fork
Great Hall Theatrics wrote John Henry vs. the Robot themselves and has been running it at the Angelus since the middle of the month. Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 are what is left of it. Tickets start at $18, and the Angelus is a 1930s movie house on Main Street, so nobody is more than a few rows from the stage.
Our take
Original musicals in this county are usually a school production or a church one. This is neither, it is PG, and eighteen dollars is less than two tickets to the movie theater four blocks away.⚠️ Heads up: It is a brand new show, which means nobody can tell you whether it is any good. That is the deal you are making at this price.
$ theaterfamilySpanish Fork
Community
Worth it 📚 American Fork puts a reading party in the park tonight, and there are cookies
The library calls it Read and Recharge, and the format is exactly what it sounds like. Everybody brings their own book, sits on the grass at Robinson Park behind the library from seven to eight, and reads. Nobody discusses anything. The staff hands out warm homemade chocolate chip cookies.
Our take
The first week of school is the week nobody in the house has anything left to say. An hour where the rule is that you do not have to talk to anyone is better designed than most things on this list.⚠️ Heads up: One hour, on the dot, and the cookies come out warm rather than at a set time. Late arrivals get the crumbs.
free freequietAmerican Fork
Market
Skip unless 🌽 The Saratoga Springs market keeps going after the rest of Monday night stopped
Neptune Park ran Summer Monday Fundays through August 10, with the bands and the magic shows and the contests for the kids. That part is over. The farmers market underneath it keeps running Mondays from five to nine all the way to September 28, minus the stage.
Our take
Skip it unless you live out that way, because what you are driving to now is produce tables and a couple of trucks rather than an evening. One real exception: if your garden overdid it, the city lets home gardeners sell their surplus here for nothing.⚠️ Heads up: The entertainment listings floating around online are left over from the Fundays run and stopped being accurate two weeks ago.
free marketproduceSaratoga Springs
🏟️ The Scoreboard
A quarterfinal on Tuesday, and it is not in Sandy
RSL is one win from a Leagues Cup semifinal, and the whole thing is happening 500 miles away. The quarterfinal against Club León is at a neutral site outside Denver on Tuesday night. League form is a different story: three straight without a win, most recently 2-1 at Orlando on Saturday.
Mina Tanaka scored twice in a loss and became the club's all-time leading scorer
The Royals went down 4-2 at San Diego on Friday, which snapped the run they had been building all summer, but Tanaka's two goals moved her past everyone who has worn the shirt. Third in the league is still third in the league.
🍴 Eat & Drink
Worth it Strap Tank, Springville
It sits off the frontage road on the west side of Springville, a 300-seat room built by a man whose actual obsession is motorcycles, and the food has quietly outgrown the gimmick.
Order the fish and chips. If somebody at the table wants the thing nobody else has, it is the crab jack sandwich with the sweet potato fries.
The real reason to drive down: the place is named after a 1907 Strap Tank Harley-Davidson, and that exact motorcycle is parked in the Legends Motorcycle Museum across the lot with about 120 others. Free to walk through, Tuesday to Friday until six and Saturday until five.
Our take
Two things happen in the same parking lot and only one of them costs money. Eat first, then go stand in front of a bike that is older than every road you drove to get there.⚠️ Heads up: This is a brewery as well as a restaurant, which for some households settles the question before the menu does.
$$ Americanfish and chipsSpringville
🌲 Get Outside
Worth it Payson Lakes has a paved loop, a swim beach and, this year, the road mostly to itself
Twelve miles up the canyon from Payson, Big East Lake has a small swim beach, picnic tables, flush toilets and an asphalt path that goes all the way around, which makes it the rare mountain lake a stroller can do. No powerboats and no OHVs, so it stays quiet.
The reason to know this one specifically: Blackhawk, further along the same road, has been closed since May 2025 to cars, bikes, horses and hikers alike, campground and trailheads included. Deer Hollow Trail closed in June for hazard trees. Payson Lakes is what is left open on that stretch, and its season runs to October 11.
Our take
Everybody defaults to American Fork Canyon and then sits in it. The Nebo Loop is the same drive time from most of the county and a fraction of the cars, and the water is cold enough in late August that the beach thins out by four.⚠️ Heads up: Fire danger in the Wasatch is rated very high right now, and a new fire started on the west side of the county Sunday. Nothing on that road is the place to test a campfire.
$ lakeeasy walkPayson
🎟️ Also Happening
🎸 The last two Bluebird nights of the summer
Friday and Saturday up at Sundance, doors at seven and the songwriters at eight, and then the series is done until next June.
🌭 Eagle Mountain's food truck rally takes its final Thursday
We counted two Thursdays left in it last week. This is the second one, six to nine at Cory Wride Memorial Park.
🏈 Lehi kicks off at four in the afternoon
Friday against St. Francis out of Maryland, three hours earlier than every other game on the board.
📰 Valley News
Utah's reservoirs dropped two more points in the space of a week
We put statewide storage at 54 percent in Wednesday's issue. By Friday the system, not counting Lake Powell and Flaming Gorge, was down to 52, and it was at 57 at the end of July. More than 93 percent of the state is now in severe or extreme drought after a record-low snowpack and one of the worst spring runoffs ever measured. The one number pointing the other way is soil moisture, which the summer monsoon has kept above normal for late August. Dry ground drinks the runoff before it ever reaches a reservoir, so whatever falls this winter has a better shot at making it into storage than last winter's did.
The state hospital in Provo has 378 beds and says it needs 30 to 60 more
Utah State Hospital, which has been on its Provo campus since 1885, runs 378 beds serving mostly adults with severe mental illness, and administrators say those beds are almost always completely full. The ask on the table is 30 to 60 more by 2028, driven by population growth and by a rising number of patients arriving through court referral. One idea being floated is converting a building already on campus rather than putting up a new one. Staffing is the other half of it, with nurses and security officers there paid below market.
Utah's state parks cleared 12 million visits for the third year running
The park system logged more than 12 million visits between July 2025 and June 2026, its third straight year above that line and its third-highest total ever. A decade ago the number was 5 million, so it has more than doubled since 2016. Sand Hollow down south led everything with over 1.4 million visits on its own. Forty-six parks carry that load statewide, Utah Lake State Park in Provo among them, and the growth is why parking lots that used to be half empty on a Tuesday no longer are.
The Debate
💙 Good Neighbor
Nominate the Valley's quiet MVPs
Every issue we spotlight one neighbor, teacher, coach, or cause quietly making the Valley better, plus an easy way to pitch in. Know someone who deserves it? Send them our way.
Nominate a neighbor →That is the week. Curtain is 7:30 Thursday and Friday in Provo, gates are 6:30 tonight in Orem, and the last two Bluebird nights are Friday and Saturday up the canyon.
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