Two shows begin performances at the Utah Shakespeare Festival this week. "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" takes the stage Monday, July 13, in the Eileen and Allen Anes Studio Theatre, and "The Book Club Play" follows on Tuesday. Both run through October 3. With them, all eight productions of the festival's 65th season will be running in repertory in Cedar City.
The festival was founded in 1961, when a drama professor named Fred C. Adams wondered what could pull tourists off the newly planned I-15 and into Cedar City for an evening. The local Lions Club staked him $1,000. His first season, staged in the summer of 1962, ran two weeks, drew 3,276 people, and included "Hamlet." The festival now plays to more than 100,000 patrons over a sixteen-week season in a town of about 41,000 residents, and it won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre in 2000. The last formal study of its economic impact, conducted on the 2014 season, put the total at $40 million. That study is now a decade old.
This year's theme is "Generations Gather Here." Three Shakespeare plays anchor the outdoor Engelstad Shakespeare Theatre. "Hamlet" returns for the first time since 2019, sixty-four years after it appeared on the festival's first bill. "Twelfth Night" is back too. The third is "Troilus and Cressida," Shakespeare's bitter Trojan War play, among his least performed, last staged at the festival in 1999.
The Deseret News spent several days in Cedar City and published its review of the six open shows on Friday. The paper called this year's "Hamlet" a can't-miss and praised Walter Kmiec in the title role. It found "Troilus and Cressida" staged for a modern audience, the set papered in war headlines, the play's commentator recast as a journalist. The musicals "Something Rotten!" and "She Loves Me," and the wartime farce "See How They Run" fill the Randall L. Jones Theatre.
The two shows opening this week are the season's contemporary wing. "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" is David Catlin's adaptation, which sets the novel alongside the lives of Mary and Percy Shelley. Risa Brainin directs her first production at the festival. Announcing the cast this spring, Brainin called this "a prescient moment to be in conversation with this great masterpiece," pointing to the question AI has put back on everyone's minds: what does a creator owe the thing it creates? "The Book Club Play," by Karen ZacarÃas, is a comedy about a book club whose members unravel once a documentary crew starts filming them. Both play the Anes, the festival's smallest theater.
The openings share the month with the rest of Utah's summer. The Utah Symphony's Deer Valley Music Festival begins July 17, with music director designate Markus Poschner conducting Beethoven's Ninth in his debut. A week later, on Pioneer Day, the Salt Lake Art Museum opens in the restored B'nai Israel Temple downtown, the first new fine art museum in the capital since 1983. The Shakespeare festival has tied its anniversary to the country's 250th, with Americana programming and exhibitions at the Southern Utah Museum of Art next door.
One more date matters here. In 2012, the festival committed to producing every play Shakespeare wrote, an initiative it calls Complete the Canon. "Troilus and Cressida" is the penultimate title on that list. The 2027 season includes "The Two Noble Kinsmen," the one Shakespeare play the festival has never produced. It will finish the project next summer, fifteen years after it began, in the same small theater where this week's shows open.
Performances of "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" begin July 13 and "The Book Club Play" July 14 at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City. Both run through October 3. Tickets at bard.org.
