Utah Shakespearean Festival to Open
Three Shakespearean plays, the musical “1776,” and two other plays will be presented on outdoor and indoor stages during the Tony Award-winning festival’s 42nd season.
by Laurie Williams Sowby
CEDAR CITY, UTAH — For more than four decades, the little college town of Cedar City has been making magic with Shakespeare under the stars. In 2000, the effort earned the Utah Shakespearean Festival a Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater — a well- deserved feather in the cap of an organization that has continued to expand its offerings along with its horizons.
The festival began in 1962 as the dream of Fred C. Adams, who’d just arrived at the College of Southern Utah (now Southern Utah University) as a theater instructor. He was sure the many tourists who came to the area to see Utah’s spectacular scenery would also love to see a Shakespeare play. With the backing of the college president and a lot of hard work from townspeople, the Utah Shakespearean Festival was launched with three plays each summer.
As it grew, the festival added lectures, play orientations, backstage tours, a costume exhibit, pre-show fun Elizabethan style in the Greenshow, and a “royal feaste” with food and merriment fit for a king.
In the late 1980s, the Utah Shakespearean Festival added other playwrights to the repertoire, mounting additional productions in its new Randall L. Jones Theater. Today that stage rotates its three plays and/or musicals with the three Shakespearean shows in the outdoor Adams Memorial Theater, built to resemble Shakespeare’s Globe.
The festival opens its summer season this year on June 19, running through Aug. 30, with six productions. Summer offerings include Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,”directed by Elizabeth Huddle; “Much Ado About Nothing,” directed by Kate Buckley; and “Richard III,”directed by J.R. Sullivan, all performed outdoors. On the Jones Theater stage (indoors) are the historical musical “1776,” directed by Brad Carroll; Garson Kanin’s comedy “Born Yesterday,” directed by Kathleen F. Conlin; and Carlo Goldoni’s zany “The Servant of Two Masters,” directed by Russell Treyz.
The fall season, inaugurated in 1999 to extend the festival’s active season, runs from Sept. 18 to Oct. 18. Up this fall: Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors,” the musical comedy “Little Shop of Horrors,” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” all on the indoor Jones Theater stage. This year, the festival has brought back the Punch and Judy marionette shows. The 500-year-old tradition gets a new twist, though, with plots taken from the evening’s productions that will follow.
“It’s lining up to be a fantastic season,” said Adams, who has stayed with USF from its inception and is now the festival’s executive director. “It’s going to be a year of delightful musicals, powerful tragedies and hilarious comedies. There certainly will be something for everyone.”
— To see complete schedule and to order tickets online for either the summer or fall season, visit www.bard.org. The site also has info on the many places to stay in Cedar City, a three-hour drive south from Provo and one hour north of St. George. (Having thought of just about everything to make it a success, the festival even offers child care while parents attend a play.)
2003 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
