Showtime Utah Cowboys Up with Mama’s Boys
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The Producer
Founder and executive producer Joan Peterson has been a key player in the Utah entertainment world for years and that was part of her motivation for taking on the massive job of starting a major live theater project. She knew she could find the talent which would put the theater on the entertainment map.
She was for years the talent agent for Utah’s most distinguished talent and modeling agency. With her sights set on bigger horizons, she moved on to found Starlight Creative Media, a full-service casting agency. That led to continuous work in movie casting. She spent a year-and-a-half working on the official LDS Church film,Joseph Smith: Prophet of the Restoration, which plays six days a week in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. That film tested her ability as a casting director when she was required to come up with 150 scruffy looking men with real beards to form a mob during filming in Nauvoo, Illinois. She thinks she had every man with a beard in all of central Illinois. She has also cast such movies as The Book of Mormon Movie, The Return, Yankles, The Outlaw Trail, Moola, and Shooting People. Peterson can be heard every Sunday as the host of KOSY106.5’s award winning show Sounds of the Sabbath.
Joan was also part of a two-person fund-raising team which held a gala at The Venetian in Las Vegas for the Rose Education Foundation involving such diverse talent as Pamela Anderson and J.C. Chassez of N’SYNC. She spent all of last summer organizing an international philanthropic summit called Playing for Good, on the island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean. It was hosted by Eva Longoria, honored the Goldie Hawn Foundation, and was the first stop Paris Hilton made after her highly publicized stint in jail. That event had a four-million-dollar budget and received worldwide media attention because of the high-powered guest list.
The Show
The premier act putting the show in Showtime Utah is Mama’s Boys, a Utah County-based family band which describes itself as playing old-time western music and fancy fiddling.
They’re the headline act for The Old West Dinner Adventure, which executive producer Joan Peterson describes as a bigger than life, over-the-top, corn-fed interactive old time western show right out of the history books. The entertaining, lively and spicy (but totally wholesome) doings at The Old West Dinner Adventure is an experience for the entire family.†† With a cowboy comedian and his band, the house Madam and a variety of old west entertainment The Old West Dinner Adventure is guaranteed fun for all ages.
Actually, it’s not just mama’s boys since Papa Scott Shumway is a key player in the band as well. He had a career as a touring rock musician in the 70s before discovering that owning an insurance company was a more stable if less dramatic way of paying the bills. He and his piano-playing wife ended up with five sons, all of whom were eager to join in on the family musical evenings. At the moment, two of his band members and sons are studying music formally on scholarships at the University of Utah in violin and bass.
Scott says the opportunity to play on a regular basis at Showtime Utah brought a serious family meeting about turning a fun family adventure into a professionally polished act. The result is that they decided to take the band pro and let audiences enjoy their unique six-part harmonies and flashy musical licks. He says it’s a stroke of luck that their voices all blend together well, since that’s not common in many groups where some members sing and the others stick to the instrumentals. The result is what he calls a ìwarm, guy soundî which has led to multiple requests for performances such as last New Year’s Eve at Salt Lake City’s First Night.
Mama’s Boys will perform on three Saturday nights a month with the fourth night going to Stampede, a Utah band which has opened for the Sons of the Pioneers, Riders in the Sky, Waddie Mitchell, and Dan Seals. Vocalist Teri Taylor is a two-time national yodeling champion and the winner of the Western Music Association’s Song of the Year for her song, ìColors (of the West). ì Both she and David Anderson. The group’s guitarist/singer, have also won that organization’s Vocalist of the Year award.
For lots more information, log onto www.showtimeutah.com
