Our family just returned from our annual pilgrimage to the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City. We’ve been attending every year since 1997, and we bring our kids and sometimes other relatives to enjoy the plays. We even attended when we were living in Singapore on home visits. We saw a young half-naked (but for some strategically placed fur) Ty Burrell as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream over ten years ago. We’ve seen countless actors who are somewhat recognizable from guest stints on Law & Order and other TV shows. In short, we are big fans of the festival.
What follows are my quick reviews of the six plays. Be warned that I may include some spoilers, mostly because any real discussion requires that level of detail. If I convince but one reader to become a patron of the festival, my work here will be complete.
First, a few quick tips about the festival:
- This is repertory theater which means that the same actors appear in multiple plays. Most actors appear in 2 or 3 of the plays, so it’s well worth it to see all the plays and see how the actors change from play to play.
- It is not like the Renaissance Faires and Festivals that tour cities. The festival puts on six plays in the summer, 2-3 in fall. Some plays are Shakespeare, some are not. There is almost always one musical. There’s no cosplay. Leave your Gandalf costume at home.
- There is also a free Greenshow on the lawn of the SUU campus before the evening plays. Our family pretty much never goes to the Greenshow which is mostly singing, dancing, and SUU students sporting Irish or British accents wandering around selling lollies, chocolates and tarts. We go for the plays, so we are not lawn dilettantes. We have been known to buy a tart or two, but that’s not the main attraction for us. [1]
- There are actor talk back sessions and seminars the next day with the cast, and these are often very good, but we generally skip them except in fall because our kids don’t like them as much as we do, and we would all rather sleep until noon. The crowds are smaller in fall.
- We’ve also done all the backstage tours and costume tours. These are entertaining, too.
- There are articles about the plays on their web site at bard.org. Well worth a visit if you plan to go.
I’ll review the summer plays in the order I saw them.
Measure for Measure. This is one of Shakespeare’s problematic plays. Duke Vincentio pretends to leave town, deputizing upstart Angelo. Angelo quickly turns into the love child of Inspector Javert and Dolores Umbridge, reinstating old anti-lechery statutes, and preparing to execute young Claudio for impregnating his girlfriend who doesn’t seem to mind even though she appears to be about 15 months along. When Claudio’s sister Isabella makes a fairly half-hearted plea to Angelo to spare her brother, Angelo at first denies her, but when he sees how willing she is to let her brother die, his interest and other things are piqued, and he offers to spare her brother if she will sleep with him. Angelo is instead tricked into sleeping with his previously spurned fiance, who also doesn’t seem to mind, and then he still sends Claudio to his execution. Duke Vincentio returns and “solves” everything by making them all marry and even offering his own hand to the icy and milquetoast Isabella.
In this version, the play ends on an enigmatic note, a nice choice. The real issue is the miscasting of Isabella and the resulting lack of any chemistry between her and Angelo that would explain his lust for her or between her and Vincentio that would explain his fervent admiration of her. It’s still a great play to contemplate, and one of my favorite lines is: “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.” It sums up well the problem with Angelo’s zealotry.
Still, the real loser of the play is Angelo’s former fiance, now wife, whose reward for her faithfulness is to be married to a villainous douchebag who only slept with her under false pretenses. Misogynist much?
Into the Woods. Sondheim’s musical has been popular for decades for its fracturing of fairy tales to ask difficult questions about what humans want, what they are willing to do to get what they want, and what happens when they get it – do they even still want it and how have they changed in the process?
This is a great adaptation of the musical, with strong voice talent all around. In particular, the two fickle princes and blood-thirsty Little Red steal their scenes. The witch is also universally appealing throughout the show. The play features festival favorites and real life married couple Brian Vaughn and Melinda Pfundstein.
Henry IV Part One. The festival is deliberately showing all of Shakespeare’s works one by one (Complete-the-Canon), which is why this seldom seen play is in rotation this year. For canon whores like our family, these plays are required watching. And yet, this adaptation is so well done, it’s worth seeing on its own merit and not just for bragging rights. Director Brian Vaughn makes great choices throughout, creating the right mix of bawdiness, antics, ambition and hot-blooded action.
Henry IV is really just the first of two prequels to Henry V. In this play, the future king Henry V is still Prince Hal, sowing his wild oats with the feckless but entertaining Falstaff whose criminal cowardice is only outdone by his witty self-defense. Falstaff laughs his way out of danger again and again, and we root for him, seeing in him maybe even more than what Prince Hal sees, yet knowing he’s just a frivolous stop on the way to the future king’s greatness. Newcomer Sam Ashdown is well cast as the young Prince, and matched scene for scene by the noble yet impetuous Hotspur played by Steve Wojtas (who also plays Angelo in Measure for Measure). For all his oat-sowing, Prince Hal seems more cautious and ponderous than his appealing and brave rival Hotspur.
Twelfth Night. The emphasis in this performance is on humor and music rather than the romantic subplots, and there is plenty to work with in this well-worn play. The best scenes involve the secondary cast with Maria, Sir Toby Belch, Feste and Andrew Aguecheek tricking and tormenting the fastidious Malvolio and just enjoying one another’s barbs and quips. Quinn Matfield steals scenes as Andrew Aguecheek, as does Aaron Gilligan-Stearle as the mellifluous Feste. If you miss seeing this one in summer, it carries into the fall season.
My kids were somewhat appalled by the age difference between Viola/Sebastian and supposed love interests Orsina and Olivia. As my 11-year old put it, “It’s like these two old people said ‘Hey, let’s get it on with some teenagers.’ Ew!”
Comedy of Errors. This is one of Shakespeare’s comedies with a very convoluted and complex plot. The clever choice to place it in the gold rush era of the old west freshened this play up considerably, substituting cowboy accents for British ones. Additionally, the longer soliloquies of exposition in which the plot twists are revealed are recited quickly for comedic effect which also made them more enjoyable all around. The play breezes by as a result, when previous versions have had a tendency to drag in the last third. It was a real treat to see a fresh reimagining of an old staple. The abess steals her scenes and brings the players together at last.
My kids made the astute observation: “Who names both their twins the same thing?”
Sense & Sensibility. This was a stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s beloved novel, and it was very well done. There was good balance between the comedic characters of Fanny Dashwood, Mrs. Jennings, Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, and the strength and chemistry of the romantic leads: man-candy Willoughby and passionate Marianne, awkward but steady Edward and no-nonsense Elinor.
Lucy Steele was slightly off, played a bit too sweetly and naively for us to truly dislike her as we must and should. And as always, the aged and decrepit 35-year old Colonel Brandon has no business pursuing a 17-year old, or as my daughter put it, “It was disgusting. I threw up in my mouth.” She stewed through most of the second half. That’s an unfortunate reality of the Austen novel, nothing the director, actors, or scriptwriter could really do to remedy it without ruining it. As is always the case with the novel, we want Willoughby to reform and deserve Marianne, or at least to take his shirt off again, but alas that is not meant to be.[2]
Now we just have to look forward to the fall season. In addition to Sherlock Holmes, they will be performing Boeing-Boeing, the French sex farce my husband and I saw on Broadway a few years ago with Bradley Whitford in the lead role.
We always end the play season by putting the plays in order from favorite to least favorite. This year, I would rank them thus:
- Henry IV, Part One
- Sense & Sensibility
- Into the Woods
- Twelfth Night
- Comedy of Errors
- Measure for Measure
Having said that, it’s an incredibly strong season with no losers. Each play was well worth it.
Discuss.
[1] If you do go this year, they have started selling these soft pretzels with cream cheese frosting for dipping. Really good alternative to the tarts.
[2] I pointed out to my daughter, it could be worse; Colonel Brandon was played by Alan Rickman (Snape) in the movie adaptation. However, she said that would have been preferable because at least she likes Snape. It did make her laugh to imagine Snape in the scenes, though.
Wheat & Tares 
“It’s like these two old people said ‘Hey, let’s get it on with some teenagers.’ Ew!”
These kids today don’t know anything about the history of the Internet, or this wouldn’t be a surprise!
😉
So trying to get to grips with what Jane Austin and Sondheim have to do with Shakespeare. Henry IV part one was one of the set pieces for my O level English Lit exam 30 years ago. I remember it vaguely, and I love 12th night.
The Wild West setting of the comedy sounds fun. Those different settings of plays don’t always work, but they can be very good when they do. There’s a really good Japanese film which is Macbeth set in the Shogun era, which is very gripping.
We caught Henry IV Part 1 and thoroughly enjoyed it. The balance of drama, comedic elements, and action was spot on.
Though IDK what a Utah Shakespeare festival has to do with LDS-oriented blog feed (other than being square in the land of Mormondom), I enjoyed the post and review. For convenience of fellow bloggers, I Googled their site…interesting how they got THIS domain name; that itself is a coup!
http://www.bard.org/
I take it that the company is more a “stock” outfit…which can actually be better to watch. I’ve been regularly going to various theatres in Northern CA for thirty years and find that the stock players, even though their sets are obviously less elaborate and some of the other technical aspects are a bit on the “economy” side, do often give as good if not a better performance than most seasoned actors. And likely the cost is less…I’ve gone up to Ashland OR every few years and see it getting more elaborate and commercialized. Not that I’ve ditched the merits of FREE Enterprise, mind you all, but summer rates for meals and lodging in Jackson County, OR, are high enough without all the prententious folk with more money than class horning in. It’s the same reason that I spend less on MAJOR league baseball and enjoy the occasional MINOR league game…more the “pure” experience and less hype and conspicuous consumption.
Hopefully the afficionados of the Bard in Southern Utah can keep it simple, affordable, and family-friendly. Might even participate as my limited funds for pleasure travel allow.
My wife loves theater, so I thought she would enjoy Shakespeare in Cedar City. She didn’t. She kept wondering why I thought she would like it. Worst birthday present ever! I’ll never make that mistake again.
Awwww…I grew up in Cedar City and sold tarts as my summer job in high school. Good times…
Douglas, your comment reminded me that a performance I really enjoyed last year was ‘The Crucible’, put on by the local amdram society, in the round, in one of the old chuches in town (this is Britain, so old churches are old), with a minimum of props, and seating for an audience of about 100 per night, on hard chairs. It was a gripping performance, and really drew the audience into the story though.
Is there any such thing as a “spoiler” for Shakespeare, after 400 years?
New Iconoclast, I was having some related thoughts last night. I think that Shakespeare’s corpus is large enough and/or (if one hasn’t read much – and some of the most commonly cited plot lines set aside ) that understanding of the plays is superficial enough that there is plenty that can be ‘spoiled’.
The great thing about Shakespeare in particular is that its depth allows for great experiences on either end. A cold turkey viewing can only happen once, and I certainly appreciate the virginal experience for it’s limited shelf life. But there is another side.
As I mentioned above I saw Henry IV Part 1 for the first time in July. Last night I started watching a film version (The Hollow Crown series) and my anticipation was different but definitely stronger. Knowing what was in store took it to a whole new level. So spoiled or unspoiled either way it’s a feast.
We just spent the last week on the Oregon coast for a family reunion. I suggested to my wife a couple of (many) times that we just ‘disappear’ and take in a few nights of the Ashland Shakespeare festival. She almost agreed.
I was born in Cedar City, but I don’t think I have ever been back, that I can remember. I think it would be a good summer experience. We have tried to take in Ashland’s as often as possible. Thanks for the reviews and tips. I am really curious now.