Seven directors are slated to bring their visions to the Utah Shakespearean Festival stages this summer. Four of the seven have directed here before, but three will be new to Festival audiences. With many theatre companies across the country closing because of the recent economic downturn, the Utah Shakespearean Festival is tightening its belt and making adjustments and cutbacks to its 2009 season to ensure its continued artistic and financial solvency.
The summer season will run June 29 to August 29 and feature Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, Henry V, and As You Like It, a well as Noel Coward’s Private Lives, the charming and emotionally-rich Foxfire, and the family musical The Secret Garden.
The fall season has changed dramatically. Instead of running September 25 to October 24 as previously announced, it will now be September 18 to October 17. Also, the plays to be performed have been changed. Instead of Pericles, The Woman in Black, and Pump Boys and Dinettes, the fall season will feature Tuesdays with Morrie, the touching tale of a teacher and his student adapted from the popular book; the ghostly and mysterious The Woman in Black; and the hilarious farce, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).
“These plays require fewer actors and other resources, yet still meet our mission of providing life-affirming classic and contemporary plays,” said Phillips in making the announcement. “In fact, the fall season provides something for everyone: comedy, mystery, and a heart-felt drama.” The directors slotted to take charge this year are top of the line.
“This year’s lineup of directing talent brings an exciting array of experience, insight and creativity to our 48th season,” said R. Scott Phillips, executive director. “Each of these marvelous directors was selected for his or her ability to bring out the very best in every aspect of play production. Each is of the very highest caliber in terms of experience and proven ability.”
Kirk Boyd will be at the helm of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and is directing for the first time at the Festival.
He is the founder and artistic director at Willamette Repertory Theatre in Eugene, Oregon. He has also been an associate director/producer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Other directing credits include Wizard of Oz, Guys and Dolls, and Crazy for You at Oregon Festival of American Music; Arthur Honegger’s King David at Oregon Bach Festival; A Streetcar Named Desire and A Servant of Two Masters at the University of Oregon; and numerous plays at Willamette Repertory Theatre
“This is a fast paced, physical comedy that is reliant on mistaken identity and general confusion to succeed,” Boyd said about The Comedy of Errors. “The play should burst out of the stage house and keep moving at a pace just this side of ‘out of control.’”
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Jim Christian, who last summer directed the popular Fiddler on the Roof, returns this year to direct and choreograph another family musical: The Secret Garden.
He has directed extensively at Pioneer Theatre Company, Park City Egyptian Theatre, Arizona Broadway Theatre, Sierra Theatre, and the Grand Theater. He received the John F. Kennedy Center Gold Medallion Award in 1994, and has taught at Weber State University, San Diego State University, and Eastern Kentucky University.
Christian sees The Secret Garden as a meaningful and joyful play. “It offers deeply powerful themes and principles that are at the very heart of the human condition,” he said. “Ultimately, when we reach the final moments of The Secret Garden, we should all feel reborn.
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Kathleen F. Conlin, one of the Festival’s associate artistic directors, is directing Foxfire.
She has directed many times at the Festival, including Candida, The Tempest, On Golden Pond, A Misummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, You Can’t Take It with You, Morning’s at Seven, Lion in Winter, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. She is a member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, the Barnard Hewitt Professor of Theatre/Director-in-Residence at the University of Illinois, and has been a tenured professor at the University of Illinois, the University of Texas at Austin, Ohio State University, and Ohio University.
“I am deeply committed to developing this ‘postcard’ of a play—nostalgic, photographic, poetic,” she said. “I keep coming back to pictures of the people—angled, firm, with a great deal of inner determination; eyes of pain and joy; hands of strength and hardship.”
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David Darlow will be directing for the first time this summer at the Festival, and will be at the helm of As You Like It.
He is currently artistic associate for Remy Bumppo Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois. He has directed at the Playwrights Horizons in New York the Orpheum Annex in Los Angeles, and the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia, among many others. As an actor, he has received the Joseph Jefferson Award and numerous other awards.
Darlow has talked of As You Like It as a play of transformation as characters move from the court to the Forest of Arden. “Here anything is possible,” he said “A woman can discover what it is like to be truly liberated, a young man is transformed from his notions of romantic love to a more mature, more profound, and more meaningful love. All who enter the Forest of Arden experience some kind of transformation.”
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Joseph Hanreddy, also new to the Festival this year, will be directing Private Lives.
He is currently in his sixteenth season as the artistic director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. A sampling of the more than thirty major productions he has directed there includes King Lear, Twelfth Night, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Mary Stuart, The Seagull, The Playboy of the Western World, The Important of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, Arcadia, Engaged, The Crucible, Dancing at Lughnasa, and others. He has also served as the artistic director of the Madison Repertory Theater and founded and served as artistic director at the Ensemble Theater Company in Santa Barbara, California.
According to Hanreddy, the play hinges on the sophisticated and stormy relationship between the two main characters, Amanda and Elyot, and their engagement with the audience. Will this couple ever manage the balance between their best and worst selves and succeed in sustaining a satisfying relationship into their later years? “Ultimately the answer to this is a delightful ambiguity that audiences can argue about on the drive home,” said Hanreddy, “and use as a catalyst to talk about their own communication challenges.”
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Kirsten Sham is returning for her fifth season as the director and choreographer of The Greenshow.
During those five years she has also served as the choreographer for several Festival productions, including The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Room Service, Stones in His Pockets, and Forever Plaid. She has been the director/choreographer for Toyland (2003, the Heritage Center) and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Eichelberger Performing Arts Center in 2002. She has also been a resident actress/dancer/choreographer at the Hunterdon Hills Playhouse, as well as a dance instructor at several theatres.
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J. R. Sullivan, the other associate artistic director at the Festival, is directing this summer the Shakespearean history Henry V.
He has directed sixteen plays previously at the Festival, including Gaslight, Othello, ‘Art’, King Lear, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Stones in His Pockets, Henry IV Part One, The Importance of Being Earnest, Richard III, I Hat Hamlet, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Driving Miss Daisy. He was recently appointed the artistic director of the Pearl Theatre in New York City, effective August 1. He has also directed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Arden Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., and others.
Sullivan speaks of the title character of Henry V as “a king and a commoner: he knows the hearts of both roles for he has played them both and become them. He is many men in one extraordinary man: he is a crafty politician, a warrior sometimes clear of mind and sometimes hot in fury, a leader who understands what it is to be led, and a prince of players in his understanding of the human heart.”
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Tickets for the 2009 season of the Festival are now on sale. To order yours, visit www.bard.org or call the Ticket Office at 800-PLAYTIX.
