Utah's state-subsidized acting company, Hale Center Theatre, is running into opposition from an unusual, and powerful, quarter. Sen. Curt Bramble questions whether taxpayer money should be used to prop up a so-called non-profit theater that pays six-figure salaries to top executives and runs a questionable for-profit costume and prop business on the side. Says Bramble:

It stands out like a sore thumb.

Hale Theatre has been geting $100,000 annual funding (plus a $85,000 one-time infusion of cash) and county ZAP taxes.

Bramble told me:

We all have to be concerned with the message we are sending. What is the ratonale [for restoring funding to the Hale Theatre] when we are cutting so many other programs?

The West Valley City-based Hale, of course, has a guardian angel at the Lege: Rep. Ron Bigelow, who slipped the funding into the budget two years ago and is trying to maintain it because his home-town theater provides "family fare."

In a turnabout, liberal arts types in the state support arch-conservative Bramble's attack on this sterling example of socialism. They have complained for years that the Hale family has exploited actors — the theater rarely pays artists at professional scale.