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 patronsInstitute of Outdoor Theatre 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.coloradoshakes.org
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.
History
1870s–1944
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."Separate Lives: The Story of Mary Rippon" by Silvia Pettem
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.James S. Sandoe Papers; L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University
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.Colorado Shakespeare Festival 2014 program
1940s to 1960s
James Sandoe and Jack Crouch, professor in the Department of English and Speech and head of CU's Creative Arts Festival, began to discuss the possibility of creating an annual Shakespeare festival on campus. Crouch took over in 1947, after which Shakespeare plays were performed in the Rippon theater every year except for 1957, when the annual production was staged in the indoor University Theater. Crouch directed seven plays over the next 10 years and founded the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, which premiered on Aug. 2, 1958, and featured three productions: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and The Taming of the Shrew. More than 7,000 patrons attended 13 performances that year, paying $1.50 per ticket. The following year, more than 13,000 people attended.
By the end of its first decade, CSF had produced 26 of the 37 plays in the canon, with only one duplication, Hamlet in 1965. Howard M. Banks' production of Henry V was filmed for television in 1961.
Crouch stepped down as executive director after the 1963 season but remained active in the festival through the 1980s. CSF directors since 1963 have been Albert Nadeau (1964–1966), Richard Knaub (1967–1976), Martin Cobin (1982–1985), Daniel S.P. Yang (1978–1981; 1986–1989), Dick Devin (1990–1994; 1997–2004), Jim Symons (1995), Philip Sneed (2007–2012) and Timothy Orr (2013–present).Office of University Communications, University of Colorado Boulder
Prominent CSF alumni include Michael Moriarty (1962), Barry Corbin (1962), Karen Grassle (1964), Barry Kraft, Joe Spano (1968), Annette Bening (1980), Jimmy Smits https://www.denverpost.com/2007/06/21/jimmy-smits-on-his-days-as-boulders-othello/ and Val Kilmer (1988) Peter Macon (2014), and Ellen McLaughlin (2023).coloradoshakes.org
1970s
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.
In 1975, with a production of Cymbeline, CSF became one of seven companies in the world and the second American university (after the University of Michigan) to perform Shakespeare's complete canon. That year the festival also produced a staged reading of The Two Noble Kinsmen, attributed to Shakespeare and John Fletcher, and Ben Jonson's Volpone, the festival's only non-Shakespeare production until 1991.
In 1978, CSF inaugurated its Young People's Shakespeare program, which performed an abbreviated versions of Twelfth Night around the Boulder community. The program morphed into a program offering internships to high school students. In 1982, CSF began its Dramaturg Program, recruiting CU doctoral students to research productions. In 1976 the festival launched CSF Annual (later renamed On-Stage Studies) a scholarly journal, under the editorship of Cobin.
1980s Under Yang, the festival began hiring professional designers, technicians and directors with national reputations, including Robert Benedetti, Audrey Stanley and Tom Markus. Yang also hired graduate students from around the country, moving beyond the confines of CU-Boulder, and in 1982 hired the first Equity actor under a "guest artist contract".
With such changes, CSF's reputation began to grow. Shakespeare Quarterly remarked that the festival "had stepped out of its academic cocoon" in its Summer 1980 issue and in 1989 praised its experimentation, from "Hamlet in outer space, to topless witches in Macbeth, to a commedia dell'arte Shrew." In 1992, CSF was named as one of the top Shakespeare festivals in the nation by Time. That same year, the Festival received the Colorado Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts and the Denver Drama Critic's Circle Award for "Best Season for a Theatre Company".
1990s Dick Devin, who started working at the CSF as a lighting designer in 1981, and done design work in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Cairo, was selected as the festival's producing artistic director nine years later.
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.
Among Devin's innovations was a program that offered free tickets to productions by other companies with the purchase of a season subscription. In 2003, for instance, those who bought CSF subscriptions also received tickets to productions at the Denver Center, Nomad Theatre, Denver's Curious Theatre, the Colorado Music Festival and the University of Colorado Concerts series.
In 2010, Devin was named an Honorary Lifetime Member Award by the U.S. Institute for Theatre Technology Inc., of which he had served as president.CU Connections
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.
2000s and 2010s
With the arrival of Philip Sneed in 2006,"Philip Sneed: A bard comes home," Denver Post 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.Denver Post 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.coloradoshakes.org
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."Phil Sneed leaving Colorado Shakes for Arvada Center" by John Moore, culturewest.org
The festival also produced holiday shows from 2007 to 2011, including A Child's Christmas in Wales (2007–2008), A Christmas Carol (2009–2010) and It's a Wonderful Life (2011).Colorado Shakespeare Festival, coloradoshakes.org
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.
Financial difficulties and restructuring
On June 19, 2011 the Daily Camera reported that the festival was restructuring after accumulating a $950,000 shortfall over the previous three seasons of Sneed's leadership, citing university and festival officials who said the economic downturn, weather and concerns about West Nile virus had negatively affected revenue."Colorado Shakespeare Festival restructures after $950,000 shortfall," Daily Camera 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.
On July 5, 2012, the college announced that just-retired Dean Todd Gleeson had "relieved the Colorado Shakespeare Festival of its obligation to repay a shortfall of $984,889" in order to "remove a distraction" for Steven Leigh, who began his tenure as dean on July 1, 2012.Memo, University of Colorado College of Arts and Sciences, July 5, 2012