Coming home to the Utah Shakespeare Festival

I’ve visited 13 Shakespeare festivals so far this year, in places ranging from a park lawn in Seattle, Washington, to a re-creation of Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia.

Arriving at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City last month, I felt like a wanderer coming home after a long journey.

Utah isn’t where it all began for me, this love affair with the performance of Shakespeare’s plays. That distinction belongs to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where I saw Hamlet when I was in high school.

But Utah took my relationship with the Bard from casual to committed. Measure for Measure at the Adams Memorial Theatre in 2014 swept me off my feet. The magic began with a festive greenshow before the play and didn’t end until the next morning’s post-show discussion. It combined fine acting with the special atmosphere of the Adams, an outdoor stage that was the closest replica to the Globe Theatre in the world at the time.

The love affair goes on

This year marks my seventh at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. The festival’s home is now the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Center for the Arts, which has three stages: a large outdoor theatre and two indoor theaters. I saw seven plays in five days. Every one reminded me yet again why I love live theater.

The Utah experience still combines all those elements that entranced me in 2014. First of all, the performers are among the country’s finest. Take Cassandra Bissell, for example. The hard-working actors in this repertory company all perform multiple roles. Bissell delivered a sweetly melancholy Jacques in As You Like It and a tormented Lady Macbeth whose despair made my heart ache.

With these two major parts to play, you might guess Bissell would take it easy in the minor role of Agrippa in Antony and Cleopatra, but no: Every word was thoughtful, every movement intentional. Whenever she was onstage, we knew it.

I could name dozens of performances I won’t soon forget. Geoffrey Kent as Antony and Kathryn Tkel as Cleopatra, dancing on the bed and wearing each other’s clothes, gave us the ecstasy of delirious lovers with a world to lose. Rob Riordan‘s Monty Navarro in A Gentlemen’s Guide to Love and Murder and Algernon Moncrief in The Importance of Being Earnest kept us laughing long after the plays ended. John DiAntonio and Caitlin Wise in Ken Ludwig’s Dear Jack, Dear Louise transported the audience to World War II and made us believe love can conquer any barrier. I could go on and on…

Welcome to this world we’ve created

Actors work in a collaborative environment. The powerful performances I saw relied on the teamwork of numerous people we never see. I pause to recognize the backstage crews who keep everything running and the inspired creative teams that pool their imagination to tell these stories. To the directors and assistant directors, dramaturgs, fight and intimacy directors, choreographers, and coaches of voice, text, and dialect; thank you. Your months of work delivered indelible moments of joy, sorrow, laughter, outrage, and empathy in every show I saw.

This festival’s production values are superlative. Creative costuming, thoughtful set design and dressing, and meaning-rich sound design and music direction give every audience an immersive experience. From the moment you enter, the message is, “Welcome to this world we’ve created.”

Welcome to a fancy drawing room in The Importance of Being Earnest. Welcome to an English music hall for A Gentlemen’s Guide to Love and Murder. Welcome to the Forest of Arden as it moves from winter to spring in As You Like It. Travel in time and space without moving from your seat. It’s magic of a very high order.

Learn how great theater is made

And here’s the thing: You can go to this festival and just enjoy watching excellent work, or you can learn about how it’s done. Would you like to know how costumes and props are designed and built? Do you want to meet some actors? Are you curious about the meaning of a play or the vision behind its production? Utah invites you to discover the answers ~ for free. Pay a small fee, and you can also take a backstage tour or watch techs change a set over from the matinee to evening show.

I owe a lot of what I know about how theaters work to Utah’s educational programming, and I can’t praise it highly enough.

Go to Cedar City!

I often write reviews of the Shakespeare plays I see, but for Utah, I offer this post instead. Dear Readers: If you can, go to Cedar City and see whatever they’re doing. You’ll be glad you did!