Shakespeare in the Rockies: The Second Season

Abstract

HE Colorado Shakespeare Festival, growing with prudence, enjoyed a prosperous and successful second season this summer. M Three plays again were given handsome and skillful stagings, the critics were enthusiastic, and the steadily larger audiences seemed to enjoy themselves thoroughly. The festival ran nightly from August i through I5 under the stars in the Mary Rippon Theater on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder. This represented a two-performance expansion over the I958 festival, and attendance climbed to Io,669 from the 7000 of the first season. There were three over-capacity houses. All in all, admissions totaled I2,689 for the entire festival, which also included, this year, three concerts of Renaissance music, a demonstration of Elizabethan fencing, and five film programs, all in the afternoons. Intelligent planning and thoughtful development, with neither bombast nor klieg lights, are winning their rewards, and the success gives one reason to be hopeful on at least several counts. In the short space of two seasons the progress has been warmly satisfying, and the outlook is exciting. Graphically, the i959 festival might possibly be represented as two peaks with a low valley-or at most a plateau-lying between them. The peaks were A Midsummer Night's Dream and, especially, Macbeth. The valley was Richard II. Both triumphs were achieved on the level of mood and illusion, the very plane upon which the theater, next after music among all the arts, wins its most notable victories in the wars with false reality. The Richard, it seemed to me, suffered from a bafflingly unsubtle interpretation of what the play is about. Had Shakespeare entertained so low an opinion of this king, unkingly as he is, I doubt we would have had any of the other histories in the Richard-Henry sequence. Richard could have been put away in his precious little grave and good riddance. Few to grieve and none to remember. But more about the Boulder Richard presently. Let me begin at the beginning. A Midsummer Night's Dream opened the festival. I salute the bright success of Colorado's Dream with some unwillingness and across the ruins of shattered prejudices. What else can I do? I was captured, and those around me on the pleasant summer evening seemed equally transported to that bedewed and teeming Warwickshire bosk which passes for a wood near Athens. And the transporting of cynical adult moderns to fairyland, I submit, is much more of a feat than worshipful teachers of English literature would like to have it. We