Summer Festival Research Articles

The Hardiness of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

A Midsummer Night's Dream baits its critics, especially those most fascinated by workings of the poet's pen . . as it ... gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. It is a much produced play. Not only staple of summer festivals and only play of Shakespearean canon produced with impunity by amateurs, A Midsummer Night's Dream receives a continual revisionist production. In this century performances have exhibited fairies dressed in tinsel with live bunnies running about stage, as well as presentations in which actors' codpieces lit up in psychedelic neon and an Amazon queen was carried about stage in a cage. The most memorable production was undoubtedly that of Royal Shakespeare Company under Peter Brook's direction, which took place in an all-white gymnasium with trapezes and whirling plates on sticks, a circus production.

I’ll be Back Before Midnight

“I’ll Be Back Before Midnight” was first commissioned by James Roy, the Artistic Director of the Blyth Summer Festival. The original production was directed by Keith Batten in Blyth on July 7th 1979. During the winter of 1979/80 the author consulted with several directors including Urjo Kareda, Keith Turnbull, Tony Lloyd, Tom Markus and Brian Rintoul and collected notes to be used during the re-writing process. The major impetus for the first re-write came from Bill Glassco, and this was completed in the spring of 1980. The final and most detailed draft was developed with Lewis Baumander, who directed the Tarragon production, during the months prior to the Tarragon opening, July 10th 1980. During this period the characters and their motives were expanded and deepened and numerous new endings were conceived. The ending that appears in this script is the one that was used in the Tarragon production. The original production had the following cast:

The Blyth Summer Festival

Southern Ontario is blessed with a great deal of summer theatre and that theatre has (deservedly or not) attracted varying degrees of critical attention and support. The Blyth Summer Festival, near Goderich, Ontario, has flourished for the last four summers without attracting widespread attention from the media. The Festival was overlooked in the Globe and Mail rundown of summer theatre in the province and so remains a largely unknown and unrecognised quality. What follows is partly an attempt to correct this by reporting on the special character of Blyth — a festival theatre which, unlike some of its more established counterparts, possesses a willingness to challenge the boundaries of traditional summer fare. This special quality, along with artistic director James Roy’s devotion to producing original work, makes such a report long overdue.

Focus on the Festivals

Theatre, of course, does need an audience to function and bottoms do have to be on the seats if work is to be done. And if this were, in fact, the quintessence of theatrical art, our major summer festivals would score highly indeed. This past season, for instance, the Stratford Festival under Robin Phillips attracted larger audiences than ever before, the Shaw Festival under Paxton Whitehead took in more money at its box office than ever before, and the Charlottetown Festival under Alan Lund ran at over 90 percent of capacity during a summer when tourism was down more than 30 percent in the Maritimes.

Coast Salish Summer Festivals: Rituals for Upgrading Social Identity

Quoiqu'on ait etudie plusieurs aspects de la culture mo derne des Salish coders, peu d'attention a ete portee aux fetes estivales des courses de canoe. Ce memoire a pour but d'etudier ces fetes estivales en tant qu'evenements rituels ser vant a valoriser l'identite sociale des Amerindiens. En tant qu'institution de rechange vis-a-vis la danse des esprits, les fetes permettent aux groupes et aux individus qui sont orientes vers la culture blanche d'atteindre un rang social et des buts culturels. L'essor des fetes estivales est une reponse a l'in teraction culturelle accrue entre les Amerindiens et les Blancs depuis 1945, interaction sans changement de la perception blanche en ce qui concerne le role de l'Amerindien.

The 1971 Season at Stratford, Connecticut

Journal Article The 1971 Season at Stratford, Connecticut Get access Errol G. Hill Errol G. Hill Dartmouth College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 22, Issue 4, Autumn 1971, Pages 371–375, https://doi.org/10.2307/2868913 Published: 01 October 1971

The Washington Shakespeare Summer Festival 1968

The Washington Shakespeare Summer Festival 1968 Get access Lynn K. Horobetz Lynn K. Horobetz Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 19, Issue 4, Autumn 1968, Pages 391–392, https://doi.org/10.2307/2868498 Published: 01 October 1968

The Washington Shakespeare Summer Festival, 1967

The Washington Shakespeare Summer Festival, 1967 Get access Lynn K. Horobetz Lynn K. Horobetz Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 18, Issue 4, Autumn 1967, Pages 409–410, https://doi.org/10.2307/2867636 Published: 01 October 1967

The Stratford Shakespearean Festival

UMMER stock is a light-hearted affair. Summer festivals often feel some obligation to be equally attractive to the dilettante tourist. The Canadian Stratford could hardly have been accused this year of following the trend. In fact, as far as much of the press of Canada was concerned, a program which offered The Comedy of Errors, Troilus and Cressida, and T imon oJ Athens seemed eccentric-a little-known comedy, a little-played tragedy, and a difficult, dark-period drama. Michael Langham, the artistic director of Stratford, does not, however, conceive his role to be entirely one of purveying the old favorites to a summer audience. The Stratford Theatre is, and always has been in its ten-year existence, a place where Shakespeare is done just as well as the resources of the Foundation permit. Since the Foundation has a first-rate, permanent theater seating over 2,000 people, and a yearly budget near the million-dollar mark, its resources are considerable. Excellence then is the aim of the Ontario Stratford and each of the three plays this summer was to be approached in its own way to give a new and vital interpretation to a public paid the compliment of being regarded as intelligent. Each play was produced in an entirely different fashion: Troilus and Cressida was a fairly orthodox production, but the arena stage of Stratford could make the battles hair-raising; The Comedy of Errors, directed by a French Canadian trained in the French classical tradition, was commedia dell' arte; Timon of Athens was done in modern dress with a musical score composed by Duke Ellington. Of these three plays, the one which excited most comment and interest was not, curiously enough, the modern dress Timon, but the commedia dell' arte Comedy of Errors. Jean Gascon, the director, was the co-founder of Le Theatre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal, and has had a rigid training in French classical theater. Whether because of this or despite it, he chose to ignore the text of The Comedy of Errors and make it a Punchinello pantomime affair. All the costumes were exaggerated pantaloon (designed by Robert Prevost and Mark Negin), and the whole performance was done as a play within a play, five Punchinellos acting as general theatrical factotums around the stage. They lighted the little lamps which stood around the center area and in which the action was from then on confined. They made comments in mime on the action of the play, which sometimes called for the actors to stop dead in their tracks and wait for this foolery to happen and to get its laugh. Though the idea of presenting it as a play within a play was good, in Jean Gascon's hands it had three disastrous effects. First, it reduced his playing area

Glyndebourne on a Metropolitan Scale

While Glyndebourne pursues its summer festival, Carl Ebert, its Artistic Director, looks back on the first nine months of his activities as Intendant of the West-Berlin Städtische Oper—a post he held already once before 1933. Ebert's come-back last September was an occasion of unusual promise. Berliners were expecting nothing less than a marvel from him. But while they gave him unlimited spiritual credit they were much more cautious about any more substantial help. The operatic warfare between the heavily state-fed East-Berlin Staatsoper and the definitely less municipally subsidised West-Berlin Städtische Oper has revealed to the greater public what an awkward position it must be to function as a West-Berlin Intendant who is easily outbought by the greater means of the people beyond the Brandenburger Tor. Nevertheless Ebert, through his rare talent for diplomacy, has emerged triumphantly from this fracas and his position is now stronger than any time before.

Italian Music Festivals

Just as the natural seasons have changed their character over a period of time, so, it may be said, have the musical seasons. Of recent years the emphasis has swung over from Autumn and Winter towards Spring and Summer, abandoning the great cities and theatres of ancient tradition for more picturesque abodes, which possess greater interest from the point of view of climate and local colour. Thus the opera and concert seasons which take place in Rome or Milan, Naples or Bologna, Palermo or Genoa begin to lose their appeal; and there is a growth of interest, on the other hand, in Spring or Summer festivals held in cities which are rich in every kind of artistic interest. Musical snobisme has suffered a change: whereas it was once considered fashionable to be present at the first night of the La Scala opera season, now it is even more so to attend the first performance of the “Maggio Musicale Fiorentino” and find oneself on the Lungarno Vespucci between the Hotel Excelsior and the Teatro Communale, or in Venice, in September, for the Festival of Contemporary Music, between the Caffè Florian and La Fenice. At bottom, however, if we consider well, the success of these festivals is due to less superficial and external causes, in as much as they satisfy the entirely modern need for summarising, condensing and intensifying the manifestations of the spirit in a brief space and limited time: for the man of to-day is always in a hurry and his curiosity cannot be kept awake for a long period. In consequence, these festivals are intended to give, in two or three weeks and in a single city, a kind of symposium of the most important musical happenings of the past year–in the fields of opera, ballet and concert–and, moreover, they are combined with the varied and famous attractions of places of touristic interest, thus realising the ideal of the utile dulci; care is taken of the health of the body, and substantial nourishment is provided for the soul.

The First Summer Festival in Berlin

The First Summer Festival in Berlin

Spring and Summer Festivals and Autumn and Winter Festivals.N. Moore Banta

<i>Spring and Summer Festivals and Autumn and Winter Festivals.</i>N. Moore Banta