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The Southern Shakespeare Festival is an annual festival in Tallahassee, Florida organized by the Southern Shakespeare Company. The festival's first incarnation existed from 1995 to 2000. In 2012, a group of scholars saw an opportunity to revive the free outdoor festival at the award-winning Cascades Park.
The Southern Shakespeare Festival was founded by American entrepreneur Michael J. Trout in November 1994 as the Florida Theater Project. In the summer of 1995, Michael Trout organized a touring company, led by David Klein. Words... Words... Words: An Evening of Shakespeare toured local theaters, regional high schools, and community arts centers.
Trout then approached Florida State University Dean Emeritus Richard G. Fallon for his help to establish a free Shakespeare in the park festival, which Trout modeled after Joseph Papp's New York free Shakespeare in the Park festivals. The Tallahassee festival and Renaissance fair ran from 1996 to 2000 as an open-air, free festival and Renaissance fair located in the downtown area behind Tallahassee's City Hall in Kleman Plaza.
The inaugural Shakespeare in the Park production in 1996, A Midsummer's Nights Dream , directed by Russian director Irina Brown, drew over 30,000 spectators according to the local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat. [1] It is recognized as one of the most successful free-theater festivals in Tallahassee with over 80,000 spectators and over 20,000 students benefitting from its educational programming during its 1996–2000 existence.
In 2012, the Southern Shakespeare Festival was revived thanks to Dr. Kevin Carr, Dr. Brent Griffin, and a dedicated group of Tallahassee theater artisans, most notably Laura W. Johnson, Catherine Leonard, and Lanny Thomas. The Adderley Amphitheater at Cascades Park is the home of the revitalized festival, and appropriately, its first production, which ran April 17–19, 2015, was A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Lanny Thomas, and starring special guest AEA artist Jef Canter as Nick Bottom.
The Southern Shakespeare Festival is greatly supported by local and state government organizations including the City of Tallahassee, Leon County Tourist Development Council, Council of Cultural Arts (COCA), State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, with spartnerships with Florida A&M University and Tallahassee Community College.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy play written by William Shakespeare in about 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot involves a conflict among four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding. Both groups find themselves in a forest inhabited by fairies who manipulate the humans and are engaged in their own domestic intrigue. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most popular and widely performed plays.
Lane Davies is an American actor.
Bell Shakespeare is an Australian theatre company specialising in the works of William Shakespeare, his contemporaries and other classics. It is based in Sydney.
Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC) was formed in 1996 by artistic director Steven Maler and associate Joan Moynagh to bring free, outdoor Shakespeare to the people of the city of Boston. Since 1996, CSC has produced one full Shakespeare production each summer starting with A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1996 at Copley Square. All subsequent productions have taken place in Boston Common, first at the Parkman Bandstand and now at the Parade Ground. In addition to the annual Boston Common productions, CSC presents several free play-reading events during the year: Theatre in the Rough, Shakespeare and Law, as well as Shakespeare and Leadership. CSC has actor-training programs for both high school students and pre-professional actors with its Summer Academy. Throughout the year, CSC partners with area high schools and Boys & Girls Clubs to provide in and after-school theater activities to inner-city youth. In 2013, CSC became the theatre in residence at Babson College.
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 Chesapeake Shakespeare Company has performance spaces in Baltimore and Elliott City, Maryland. Its main indoor space, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company Theater opened in 2014 after a $7M renovation of the Mercantile Bank Building, a site listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In addition, The Studio, is located next door on the fourth floor of the Merchants Club space and is used for educational programs, rehearsals and as an alternate performance space for CSC. They continue to perform outdoor every summer at the Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park in Ellicott City, Maryland.
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.
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.
The Illinois Shakespeare Festival (ISF) is held in Bloomington, Illinois, United States at Ewing Theatre and in Normal, Illinois, United States at the Center for Performing Arts Theatre at Illinois State University. The Festival began in 1978 and celebrated its 45th season in 2023. The Festival has traditionally presented three plays. Although all three may be Shakespeare plays, the Festival has also included different types of theater, such as Restoration comedy, Commedia dell'arte, or works by contemporary playwrights.
The Dark Lady Players is a New York-based Shakespeare company who perform what they regard as the religious allegories in the Shakespearean plays. In 2007, they performed an allegorical production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Abingdon Theater in New York. In 2008, they performed As You Like It: The Big Flush, directed by Stephen Wisker, at the Midtown International Theatre Festival with an entirely female cast interspersing Shakespeare's As You Like It with "cultural and literary references" believed to be included by Emilia Bassano Lanier. On December 15, 2009, they produced a festival at Manhattan Theater Source of short plays written about Lanier by nine New York City playwrights. In September 2011, they presented "nine scenes from Shakespeare, divided into three thematic groups and casts" in the West-Park Presbyterian Church in Upper West Side.
The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (HVSF) is a non-profit professional theater company based in Garrison, New York. The festival runs a roughly fourteen-week repertory season each year, operating under a large open-air theater tent. Its productions attract a total audience of about 50,000 from the Hudson Valley, New York City, and 40 US states.
The Maynardville Open-Air Theater is an outdoor theatre in Maynardville Park, Wynberg, Cape Town, South Africa. It seats 720 people and is known for its annual Shakespeare in the Park plays.
The Nashville Shakespeare Festival is a Shakespeare festival in Nashville, Tennessee.
Shakespeare by the Sea is a nonprofit organization that was launched in 1998 by Producing Artistic Director Lisa Coffi. Shakespeare by the Sea offers a free repertory season that runs for ten weeks throughout Los Angeles and Orange County. All performances are admission free. Each summer, the company tours about 20 cities for as many as 40 performances.
Synetic Theater is a non-profit physical theater company located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. It performs at the Crystal City Theatre in Arlington Virginia. Since its formation its productions have received numerous awards.
Irina Brown is a theatre and opera director in the United Kingdom, where she has lived and worked for over thirty years. Brown was the artistic director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow from 1996 to 2000, and Natural Perspective Theatre Company, London from 2006 to 2011. She is noted for directing the production of Further Than the Furthest Thing by Zinnie Harris for the Royal National Theatre, The Sound of Music for the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Racine's Britannicus at Wilton's Music Hall and The Importance of Being Earnest at Open Air Theatre, Regents Park as well as Bird of Night by Dominique Le Gendre at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and War and Peace for the Scottish Opera/ RSAMD. Brown was the Granada Artist-in-Residence at the University of California, Davis in 2004 and 2008.
Shakespeare in the Park is a term for outdoor festivals featuring productions of William Shakespeare's plays. The term originated with the New York Shakespeare Festival in New York City's Central Park, originally created by Joseph Papp. This concept has been adapted by many theatre companies, and over time, this name has expanded to encompass outdoor theatre productions of the playwright's works performed all over the world.
Sport For Jove Theatre Company is an Australian theatre company. It was founded in 2008 by Damien Ryan (actor/director) and Terry Karabelas (actor/director). The company stages the works of William Shakespeare and other classical and new Australian writers.
Oak Park Festival Theatre (OPFT) is a professional theatre company in Oak Park, Illinois, under contract with Actors' Equity Association. The company was founded in 1975 by Marion Kaczmar, an Oak Park resident and arts patron, and performed Renaissance works, almost exclusively by William Shakespeare, until 2004, when it broadened its scope to classics of other eras. Its outdoor venue has been Austin Gardens, a wooded park near downtown Oak Park within walking distance from restaurants, Frank Lloyd Wright landmarks, and Metra and CTA trains. To attract a greater following, Renaissance, classical, and modern American works were added to the offerings, some being produced indoors in historic Farson-Mills Home and, in the 2010-11 season, in the studio space in the Madison Street Theatre.
The New Swan Theater is an outdoor, portable theater that is assembled and disassembled each summer as part of New Swan Shakespeare Festival, the annual Shakespeare festival at the University of California, Irvine. It is a reduced-size replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.
The Hudson Shakespeare Company is a regional Shakespeare touring festival based in Jersey City in Hudson County, New Jersey, that produces an annual summer Shakespeare in the Park festival and often features lesser done Shakespeare works such as The Two Noble Kinsmen and Timon of Athens. The company also produces several modern-day productions in non theatrical venues such as their courtroom shows of Inherit the Wind and A Few Good Men in the Hoboken Municipal Courtroom. It produce a yearly educational program that ranges from student workshops to full length Shakespeare productions.