Colorado Shakespeare Festival

Shakespeare festival in Boulder, Colorado

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival is a professional acting company in association with the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was established in 1958, making it one of the oldest such festivals in the United States, and has roots going back to the early 1900s. Each summer, the festival draws about 25,000 patrons to see the works of Shakespeare, as well as classics and contemporary plays, in the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre and indoor University Theatre. The company is made up of professional actors, directors, designers and artisans from around the United States and the world, along with student interns from around the nation. Timothy Orr, the current producing artistic director, was hired in 2014 after serving as an actor in the company since 2007 and associate producing artistic director since 2011. In early April 2020, with the uncertainty of the ongoing worldwide COVID 19 pandemic, CSF cancelled the summer 2020 season altogether. It resumed in 2022. In 2023, renovations to the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater were announced.

The festival has roots in the earliest days of the University of Colorado at Boulder, when senior classes performed commencement plays under a grove of cottonwood trees planted in the 1870s on the east lawn of the first building on campus, Old Main. When electric lights became available in 1901, the university began to stage evening performances. The tradition was interrupted by World War I and resumed in 1919 by George F. Reynolds, an Elizabethan theater scholar and professor of English Literature. In 1936, Reynolds helped develop plans to build the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre. Rippon (1850 1935) was the first female professor at the university and is believed to have been the first woman in the United States to teach at a state university. She was chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and also served, without financial compensation, as Dean of Women. After her death, University President George Norlin suggested that a planned outdoor theater be named in Rippon's honor. Construction began in 1936 with funding from the Board of Regents and the federal Works Progress Administration, as well as private donations. “Alumni Day” celebrations were held in the still incomplete theater on June 13, 1936. The Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre was officially completed in 1939, but no plays were staged there until 1944, when book reviewer, Shakespeare scholar and associate director of libraries in charge of acquisitions James Sandoe was asked to direct a play. Because the University Theatre was occupied by the Department of the Navy due to the war effort, Sandoe, also influential in developing the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, decided to stage Romeo and Juliet in the outdoor theater. The event was so popular that it was followed by The Merchant of Venice in 1945 and Henry IV, Part I in 1946. Sandoe directed nine seasons for CSF between 1961 and 1973. No director helmed more productions until Department of Theatre and Dance professor James Symons pushed the mark to 11 in recent years. However, no one to date—70 years later—has directed more productions of Shakespeare's plays on the Mary Rippon stage. All four of Sandoe's children appeared in the CSF; son Sam Sandoe and daughter Anne Sandoe continue to act in the festival each summer.

The Rippon theater was used through 1966 as originally built — a three level stage facing an open amphitheater with sandstone benches seating for about 2,000 patrons. In 1967, the university funded construction of stone walkways and forestage, and constructed two large light towers in 1968. Through the years, the Rippon theater has been continually altered and improved. In 1981 Yang hired Richard Devin to make the Rippon space more theatrical and to create more lighting areas on the stage. Under Devin in the 1990s and 2000s, CSF bumped the number of annual summer productions from three to four, with occasional forays into non Shakespeare or related material, such as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1995 and Molière's The Miser in 1996. The festival began to experience budget shortfalls, which were periodically covered by the College of Arts and Sciences. Devin cited funding challenges as one reason he decided to step down: "After 17 years of trying to find a half million dollars a year, it gets to be a struggle to get up and make it happen every year. That's the principal reason," he told the Daily Camera. CSF began producing six plays each year, including non Shakespeare works such as Woody Guthrie’s American Song (2008) and To Kill a Mockingbird (2009). To Kill a Mockingbird was widely praised by critics and earned a prestigious Ovation Award from The Denver Post for its director, Jane Page. Sneed was a CU Boulder graduate and former CSF actor who came to the festival after serving as director of the Foothill Theatre Company in Nevada City, California. Sneed was seen as willing to experiment. He invited Tina Packer, founder of Shakespeare & Company, to present her five part work, Women of Will, performed by Pack and Nigel Gore in 2011, and special performances of a condensed version in 2012. He also launched a plan to perform Shakespeare's Henriad — Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V, over three seasons, 2013–15. The festival also produced holiday shows from 2007 to 2011, including A Child’s Christmas in Wales (2007–08), A Christmas Carol (2009 10) and It’s a Wonderful Life (2011). He also established a “cultural exchange” with the Maxim Gorky Theatre in Vladivostok, Russia. In 2011, CSF hosted Gorky director Efim Zyenyatsky and Russian actors for a bi lingual production of Nikolai Gogol's The Inspector General. In October 2012, he traveled with frequent CSF actors Jamie Ann Romero and Geoffrey Kent to Vladivostok, where they performed in a bilingual version of Michael Frayn's Noises Off, which CSF had produced the previous summer.

On June 19, 2011 the Daily Camera reported that the festival was restructuring after accumulating a $950,000 shortfall over the previous three seasons, citing university and festival officials who said the economic downturn, weather and concerns about West Nile virus had negatively affected revenue. The festival had sought to halt the mounting losses by cutting rehearsal time, staff and payroll, and reducing the number of outdoor performances, even while continuing to emphasize innovation. Under pressure from the university's Board of Regents, the college had initiated a restructuring in 2011, shifting some responsibilities from the director to new accounting and associate producing director positions and creating a new executive board to “share management responsibilities” with the director. The change, directed by campus Provost Russ Moore, was intended to improve efficiency while increasing visibility and revenue.

On Jan. 14, 2013, Sneed announced that he was leaving CSF to take a position as executive director for the Arvada (Colorado) Center for Arts and Humanities. Associate Producing Artistic Director Timothy Orr was tapped as the interim director. The 2013 season — A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged, Richard II and Women of Will: The Overview — saw a 17 percent increase in ticket revenue, which allowed the festival to pay off loans for capital improvements to the Rippon theater and make a voluntary contribution to the college in an effort to repay debt underwriting. The festival was bucking a trend, which had seen the collapse of two prominent Shakespeare programs, Santa Cruz (which has announced it will be resurrected in 2015 and the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, over the previous year. The season also drew critical praise, particularly for Geoffrey Kent's unconventional production of Midsummer. “The performers provide moments of comedy, insight or pure delight,” wrote Denver's Westword. Former Denver Post theater critic John Moore, now associate director of content strategy for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, declared, “In the summer of 2013, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is a mover and a shaker.”

Following a national search, the College of Arts and Sciences announced on April 11, 2014 that it had named interim director Orr as producing artistic director. As interim director, Orr oversaw planning for the upcoming season, which included The Tempest, The Merry Wives of Windsor, I Hate Hamlet, Paul Rudnick's comedy about a young actor haunted by the ghost of Shakespearean actor John Barrymore, Henry IV, Part 1 and two “original practices” performances of Henry IV, Part 2. The 2014 season was well received by critics, particularly I Hate Hamlet, starring veteran Denver Center for the Performing Arts actor Sam Gregory as Barrymore — “An absurdly magnificent turn makes ‘I Hate Hamlet’ lovable,” wrote The Denver Post. Critics also praised the sold out performances of Henry IV, Part 2 using original practices, which aim to recreate the staging, rehearsal and performance conditions of Elizabethan England. “The verisimilitude to original practices is delightful,” wrote coloradodrama. com. While researching I Hate Hamlet, CU Boulder theater graduate student Roxxy Duda stumbled upon a large, all but forgotten archive of Barrymore materials — letters, photographs, personal items including the contents of his wallet at death, and more. The actor had no association with the university, but had willed the materials to his friend, theater critic Gene Fowler, a Denver native who wrote a biography of Barrymore, Goodnight, Sweet Prince. The 2014 season was also a box office success, as CSF topped $800,000 in ticket sales for the first time. In November 2014 CSF announced its 2015 summer lineup. On the outdoor stage were Much Ado About Nothing and Othello, with Emmy Award winning stage, TV and film actor Peter Macon in the title role. On the indoor stage, the regional premier of David Davalos’s comedy Wittenberg, which pits Martin Luther and Dr. Faustus in a battle of wills over their student, Hamlet, the final chapter of the Henriad, Henry V, and two “original practices” performances of Henry VI, Part 1. In 2015, Blue Mountain Arts celebrated 20 years as the festival's primary season sponsor with an insert in the program. In 2017, the festival performed the second and third parts of Henry VI, completing the Shakespeare canon for the second time.

One bright spot for CSF during its financial difficulties was the creation of a three pronged education program. The programs included Camp Shakespeare and a School of Theatre for children, age 6 to 18, and a school tour developed with CU Boulder's Center for Study and Prevention and Violence, which presents abbreviated Shakespeare plays — Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing and others — and workshops to teach students about such things as bullying and the harm of gossip. Those programs brought in more than $97,000 of revenue and $40,000 in grant funding in 2011–12. CSF's anti violence school tour has received national attention, including a story on PBS NewsHour. By the end of 2014, the program had been presented to more than 50,000 Colorado school children.

Colorado Shakespeare Gardens, established in 1991, maintains public gardens featuring plants referred to in the works of Shakespeare. The organization provides educational support to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival through free garden tours, public presentations and research. Our goal is to grow plants that were authentic to Shakespeare's time. The organization's mission statement reads, "To learn, teach, and understand about the plants and their meaning in the plays. To help and assist with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and the Colorado Shakespeare Guild whenever we are able." Volunteer members design, plant and maintain the Thyme Garden, Romeo and Juliet Garden, Long Bed Garden and Knot Garden in a courtyard adjacent to the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre, between the Hellems Arts and Sciences and Education buildings. Among the plants featured are chamomile, cowslip, lily, hawthorn and rosemary. Colorado Shakespeare Gardens is currently planning an expansion and upgrade of the gardens that is expected to take several years. A musical or other entertainment group performs in the Shakespeare Garden before the evening onstage shows for picnickers and other listeners. The Green Shows start about 90 minutes before the plays begin and last about 45 minutes. The Boulder Renaissance Consort has appeared frequently since the early 1980s. For over thirty years, Chuck Wilcox played William Shakespeare and answered questions from picnickers about the plays being performed that year.