This Festival was started in response to two influences: summer tourists desiring more evening activities after visiting the area’s national parks, and a young actor’s desire to produce great theatre, Festival Founder, Fred C. Adams.
In the first year, the Festival presented The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. A small company of college students and townspeople produced the plays on an outdoor platform backed by a partial replica of an Elizabethan stagehouse. The initial two-week season attracted an excited 3,276 spectators, yielded a much needed $2,000 on which to build a second season, and demonstrated the cooperative relationship between college and community which still flourishes today.
In 2000, the Festival received the coveted Tony Award for America’s Outstanding Regional Theatre. The Tony Award is the most prestigious and sought-after award in live theatre. The award for the Outstanding Regional Theatre honours a regional theatre company that has “displayed a continuous level of artistic achievement contributing to the growth of theatre nationally.”
The desire for continued growth and expansion led the Festival and Southern Utah University to join forces in order to build the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Center for the Arts. Groundbreaking for the Center will take place in March of this year with completion in 2016. The Center will include a new outdoor Shakespeare Theatre, a studio theatre, the Southern Utah Museum of Art and an artistic and production facility. The Center will incorporate visual arts, live theatre and dynamic arts education that will dramatically enrich the cultural life of Cedar City and its surrounding region.
Today, the Festival is hailed as one of the world’s foremost regional theatres and attracts more than 130,000 patrons from throughout the nation to a five-month season of plays and musicals. The Greenshow, backstage tours, literary seminars, production seminars, and play orientations enrich the memorable Festival experience. Striving to satisfy a modern audience’s desires, the Festival works hard to remain accessible and relevant by focusing on the rich language presented in the text of the wonderful stories told on its stages.
For more information and tickets visit www.bard.org