Ian Gallanar is an American theatre director. He is the founder and current Artistic Director of the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. [1]
Ian Gallanar is an American theatre director. He is the founder and current Artistic Director of the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. [1]
Gallanar trained at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His early career was mostly as an actor and playwright having performed and written for companies across the United States including New City Theater, The Seattle Theater Project, Repertory Theater of America, North Carolina Theater for Young People, etc. In 1989, he co-founded the Seattle Performance Lab and was its Co-Artistic Director for two seasons. He was the Artistic Director of The National Theatre for Children and led the company through its growth into the nation's most active children's theater from 1993 to 1998. At NTC, Gallanar wrote and directed productions that reached well over 3 million students across the country. In 1997, Gallanar founded the Minnesota Shakespeare in the Park in Minneapolis.
In 2002, Gallanar founded The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company is the largest classical theater in Maryland with annual operating budgets of $3M. He has directed a number of productions with the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company including Hamlet , Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Coriolanus , Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lysistrata , The Front Page, As You Like It, Cyrano de Bergerac , Twelfth Night and many others. In 2012, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company acquired the Mercantile Trust and Deposit Company building in Downtown Baltimore in order to convert it into a modern Shakespearean playhouse. The Chesapeake Shakespeare Theater opened on September 19, 2014. In 2017, CSC expanded its operations ever further with the opening of The Studio at the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, located next door to the existing theater. The Studio is a classroom, rehearsal and alternative performance space.
In 2023, Gallanar and the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company launched Shakespeare Beyond, a program to bring live performances and arts experiences to neighborhoods in Baltimore and communities across the State of Maryland.
Chesapeake Shakespeare Company's theater education programming is the largest in the State of Maryland and the organization, as a whole, serves as a model for arts organizations around the country for its sustained growth and strategic development.
Ian Gallanar is a Howie Award Winner (Howard County, Maryland) for Outstanding Artist for lifetime achievement in the arts, a Distinguished Alumni of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a Telly Award Winner, a Helen Hayes Tribute Award Winner and a member of the prestigious National Theater Conference. Ian is a Past-President of the international Shakespeare Theatre Association and was a recipient of their 2023 Sandra and Sidney Berger Award given in recognition of lifetime achievements as an Artistic Director.
Chicago Shakespeare Theater (CST) is a non-profit, professional theater company located at Navy Pier in Chicago, Illinois. Its more than six hundred annual performances performed 48 weeks of the year include its critically acclaimed Shakespeare series, its World's Stage touring productions, and youth education and family oriented programming. The theater had garnered 77 Joseph Jefferson awards and three Laurence Olivier Awards. In 2008, it was the winner of the Regional Theatre Tony Award.
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The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company (CSC) is a theatre company based in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 2002 by Ian Gallanar and Heidi Busch-Gallanar, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company has grown into one of the twenty largest Shakespeare theaters in the United States under the leadership of founding artistic director Ian Gallanar and managing director Lesley Malin. The company has performance spaces in Baltimore and Ellicott City, Maryland. Its main indoor space, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company Theater, opened in 2014. They perform outdoor every summer at the Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park in Ellicott City, Maryland.
Michael Kahn CBE is an American theater director and drama educator. He was the artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. from 1986 until his retirement in 2019. He held the position of Richard Rodgers Director of the Drama Division of the Juilliard School from 1992 to 2006.
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The Greater Baltimore Theater Awards are theater awards to recognize excellence in the professional theater in the Greater Baltimore, Maryland (USA) area since 2004.
The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival was a small nonprofit theatre that produced plays by or about Shakespeare in Baltimore, Maryland. It also had an educational program that introduced school children to Shakespeare. The company existed, in different forms, from 1994 to 2010.
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Bag&Baggage Productions is a professional theatre company based in Hillsboro, in the U.S. state of Oregon. Founded in 2005, the non-profit group produces up to five fully staged plays per year and presents a variety of other acts and events. Their home venue is "The Vault", a theater located in a former bank building in downtown Hillsboro, Oregon, on East Main Street.
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& Juliet is a 2019 coming-of-age jukebox musical featuring the music of Swedish pop songwriter Max Martin, with a book by David West Read. The story focuses on a "what if" scenario, where Juliet decided not to kill herself at the end of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.