The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is a regional repertory theatre in Ashland, Oregon, United States, founded in 1935 by Angus L. Bowmer. From late February through October each year, the Festival now offers 800 to 850 matinee and evening performances of a wide range of classic and contemporary plays not limited to Shakespeare to a total annual audience of nearly 400,000. The Festival welcomed its millionth visitor in 1971, its 10-millionth in 2001, and its 20-millionth visitor in 2015. At any given time between five and eleven plays are offered in daily rotation six days a week in its three theatres.
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Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Introduction
Ashland, Oregon. Ashland, Oregon Ashland, Oregon, United States Ashland.
who directed the first friday the 13th movie
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Sean S. Cunningham
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where was he born?
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New York City
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how did he start his career?
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Cunningham's first jobs after graduating from Stanford included managing theater companies such as New York's Lincoln Center as well as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
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where did this latter mentioned festival originate?
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The word "Shakespeare festival" may have originated from the professional company operating out of Stratford-upon-Avon in the late 19th century. From 1886 to 1919, Frank Benson directed 28 spring and six summer "Shakespeare festivals" at the original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford. In 1935 the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, or OSF, was founded in Ashland, Oregon, USA. Originally named the "Oregon Shakespearean Festival"; the name was changed in 1988. Angus L. Bowmer, founder of OSF, wrote in 1954 that Shakespeare Festivals have in common the following attributes: 1) established firmly in one place; 2) repertoire (staging a variety of Shakespeare plays) and 3) a physical stage similar to that used in Shakespeare's lifetime.
Shakespeare festival | Origins
Cunningham, and Cindy Im.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Alumni Actors
Angus L. Bowmer (September 25, 1904 – May 26, 1979) was the founder of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, United States. During his tenure as artistic director, he produced all 37 of William Shakespeare's plays and performed 32 Shakespearean roles in 43 separate stagings.
Angus L. Bowmer | Introduction
Production history of plays performed by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, .
Production history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Introduction
However, they pressed Bowmer to add boxing matches to cover the expected deficit. Bowmer agreed, feeling such an event was in perfect keeping with the bawdiness of Elizabethan theatre. The Works Progress Administration helped construct a makeshift Elizabethan stage on the Chautauqua site, and confidently billing it as the "First Annual Oregon Shakespearean Festival", Bowmer presented "Twelfth Night" on July 2 and July 4, 1935, and "The Merchant of Venice" on July 3, directing and playing the lead roles in both plays himself. Reserved seats cost $1, with general admission of $.50 for adults and $.25 for children (approximately equivalent to $, $, and $ in 2019).
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | History
Begun at and by OSF, Play on! has become an independent nonprofit organization.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Play on!
Finally, 15-20 unpaid Internships of two to four months annually provide emerging artists and administrators with hands-on experience by pairing them with a Festival staff member in the assistant's area of interest. Internships may fulfill academic requirements determined by recipient's home academic institution.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Professional staff
The festival did not present any productions from 1941 to 1946. This was due to World War II and a fire that burned down the festival's original Elizabethan Theatre. In 1951, actors from the summer acting company formed the Vining Repertory. This "edition" of the festival was created to present plays in indoor venues that allowed the season to utilize more of the year when winter weather would prohibit outdoor performances. They performed for three seasons in a local venue known as the Lithia Theatre before a fire destroyed the stage, stock, and records. The name "Vining Repertory" was in honor of the brothers who founded the Lithia Theatre and who had died just before the creation of this "sub-company".
Production history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival | The Post-War Years (Late 1940s & 1950s)
One of the original founders, Dan Peterson, died in 2008.
Idaho Shakespeare Festival | History
The scripts didn't arrive on the set until three minutes before air time. The Festival achieved widespread national recognition when, from 1951 to 1973, under the direction of Andrew C. Love (1894–1987), NBC broadcast abbreviated performances each year that were carried by more than 100 stations nationally and, after 1954, on Armed Forces Radio and Radio Free Europe. The programs won favorable reviews from critics that drew audiences to the Festival from around the country. The programs led "Life" magazine to do a story on the Festival in 1957, bringing even more people to the plays. The NBC programs and the subsequent attention go a long way to explaining how a tiny out-of-the-way timber town in the Northwest became a theatrical and tourist Mecca.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | History
“Expanding an audience’s horizons doesn’t necessarily mean doing new work,” he said in a 1987 interview for the festival’s program notes. The danger isn't so much not doing new work as in ignoring the old work. Besides, just because a play was written a long time ago doesn't make it old.”
Jerry Turner (theater director) | Oregon Shakespeare Festival
There had to be, as designer Richard Hay put it, a "certain amount of tucking and squeezing." Each director had to solve the problem of an immovable roof support in the middle of the stage. For instance, in one production, it became a crucifix after adding a horizontal piece. The theatre reverted to its earlier roles in 2002 when it was replaced by the New Theatre, now renamed the Thomas Theatre. Among those roles are rehearsal space, meeting and audition rooms, classes, and since 2011 as a home for the Black Swan Lab (see above).
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Black Swan
According to Bowmer, the inspiration for Elizabethan staging of contemporary Shakespeare productions came from William Poel, an English director who organized the Elizabethan Stage Society in London in the early 20th century. His concepts of Elizabethan staging were brought to North America by Ben Iden Payne. Other early Shakespeare festivals in North America staged on replicas of the Globe Theatre include the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego (1937) and the Hofstra Shakespeare Festival, launched at Hofstra University in 1950. The American Shakespeare Theatre operated on a festival stage in Stratford, Connecticut, United States from 1955 to the 1980s.
Shakespeare festival | Origins
The idea for Britt originated in 1963, when Portland conductor John Trudeau and several friends visiting southern Oregon in search of a place to start a summer music festival. The former hillside estate of Jacksonville pioneer Peter Britt was perfect, with its natural acoustics and scenic views of the valley in the distance. The beauty of the valley further motivated them to start something, and that summer a plywood stage was built. A local orchestra provided the only music until 1978, when the current pavilion was constructed. From there the festival continued to grow to include more seats and attract national attention, with high-profile artists frequently performing.
Britt Festival | History
Anthony Heald, Howie Seago, Tyler Layton, Kelvin Underwood, and Judith-Marie Bergan
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Active
He was artistic director from 1991 to 1995.
Henry Woronicz | Oregon Shakespeare Festival years
A list of the number of times the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has produced each of Shakespeare's plays is available below. It counts only main stage productions produced in Ashland and at OSF Portland. The Festival has completed the canon of the first folio four times: the first time with Troilus and Cressida in 1958, and the remaining times with Timon of Athens in 1978, 1997, and 2016. "*indicates shows not part of the First Folio canon."
Production history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Cumulative Shakespeare Canon Productions
In the early years, OSF only produced works of Shakespeare. In July 1939, OSF was invited to present their production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Golden Gate International Exposition. The performance was broadcast nationally over NBC Radio. The interest drawn up by the national broadcast may have been the necessary exposure that allowed the Festival to return following World War II.
Production history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival | The Early Years (1930s)
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is a regional repertory theatre in Ashland, Oregon, United States, founded in 1935 by Angus L. Bowmer. From late February through October each year, the Festival now offers 800 to 850 matinee and evening performances of a wide range of classic and contemporary plays not limited to Shakespeare to a total annual audience of nearly 400,000. The Festival welcomed its millionth visitor in 1971, its 10-millionth in 2001, and its 20-millionth visitor in 2015. At any given time between five and eleven plays are offered in daily rotation six days a week in its three theatres.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Introduction
In 1893, the residents of Ashland built a facility to host Chautauqua events. In its heyday, it accommodated audiences of 1,500 for appearances by the likes of John Philip Sousa and William Jennings Bryan during annual 10-day seasons. In 1917, a new domed structure was built at the site, but it fell into disrepair after the Chautauqua movement died out in the 1920s. In 1935, the similarity of the remaining wall of the then-roofless Chautauqua building to Elizabethan theatres inspired Southern Oregon University drama professor Angus L. Bowmer to propose using it to present plays by Shakespeare. Ashland city leaders loaned him a sum "not to exceed $400" (approximately ) to present two plays as part of the city's Independence Day celebration.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | History
Print materials include annual reports, brochures, calendars, correspondence, course handouts, course readings, news clippings, newsletters, photographs, posters, scripts, statistics and survey reports, study guides, and teacher information kits, guides, and resource kits. Audio and video recordings include radio broadcasts and school visit program performances.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Archives
Woronicz was born in Northampton, Massachusetts of Polish and Irish descent. He graduated from Bridgewater State College in 1976, with a BA in Communication Arts and Sciences. He acted and directed at the Utah Shakespearean Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, Los Angeles Theatre Center and others, before joining the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1984.
Henry Woronicz | Early life
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is a regional repertory theatre in Ashland, Oregon, United States, founded in 1935 by Angus L. Bowmer. From late February through October each year, the Festival now offers 800 to 850 matinee and evening performances of a wide range of classic and contemporary plays not limited to Shakespeare to a total annual audience of nearly 400,000. The Festival welcomed its millionth visitor in 1971, its 10-millionth in 2001, and its 20-millionth visitor in 2015. At any given time between five and eleven plays are offered in daily rotation six days a week in its three theatres.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Overview
Ironically, the profit from the plays covered the losses the boxing matches incurred. The Festival has continued ever since (excepting 1941–1946 while Bowmer served in World War II), and quickly developed a reputation for quality productions. Angus Bowmer's first wife Lois served as art director, creating both costumes and scenery during the formative years of the Festival from 1935 to 1940. In 1939, OSF took a production of "The Taming of the Shrew" to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco that was nationally broadcast on radio. The lead actress, learning at the last minute the broadcast would be to a national audience, suffered a panic attack, was rushed to the hospital, and the stand-in took over.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | History
The Box Office (J on the OSF campus map above) is on the same courtyard as the Thomas Theatre. The Festival acquired the Administration Building (C) in April 1967. Forming the northern boundary of the campus, the building houses the artistic, business, education, group sales, literary (D), human resources, development, and community productions offices as well as the mailroom. The adjacent Camps Building (A) houses the members' lounge, communications and marketing offices, and a meeting room. The Festival's costume shop occupies the Pioneer Building at the northwest corner of campus and an annex in the Administration building. The staff of over 60 creates the costumes and accessories in three main studios on the lower floor of the building and in an extension of the Administration Building.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Other buildings
Braille, large print, and audio playbills are available for all productions.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Access Service Program
A chart emphasizing the repertory nature of OSF lists all the actors and their parts in the plays. The Festival also publishes a "Bard Scorecard," which lists all of William Shakespeare's Plays, the years OSF produced them, and allows repeat patrons to cross off which plays they've seen towards completing the canon.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Publications
The 60s confirmed the demand for an indoor venue that permitted performances in colder months. Vining Rep continued for another year in a new venue: a local movie theatre called The Varsity Theatre with the dressing rooms in a trailer behind the venue. Later in the decade, the festival used the Varsity for matinee performances of Ballad Operas, but were soon able to raise enough money to build a new indoor space: The Angus Bowmer Theatre.
Production history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival | The 1960s
The 1970s began with the first season in the new Angus Bowmer Theatre. In 1977, after being used for company-only play performances and staged readings, the Black Swan Theatre became another venue presenting shows as a part of the main OSF season. The Black Swan was used for more experimental or intimate productions.
Production history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival | The 1970s
Richard L. Hay (born 1929) is the Principal Theatre and Scenic Director at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Richard L. Hay (scenic designer) | Introduction
It features a morning fun run, an afternoon play reading, an "arts and treasures" sale and an evening variety show and underwear parade.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Economic importance
The Tudor Guild, a separate non-profit corporation, operates the Tudor Guild Gift Shop (B) and Brass Rubbing Center (K), where visitors can make facsimiles of 55 historic English brasses under expert guidance. Just off campus, a purpose-equipped fitness center helps actors stay fit for physically demanding roles that often require acrobatics, fights, and pratfalls.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Other buildings
Alan Klem, an Assistant Professor at Creighton University, and Dr. Cindy Phaneuf, then an Assistant Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, founded Nebraska Shakespeare in 1986. Klem previously helped found Shakespeare in the Park in Ft. Worth, TX. Nebraska Shakespeare presents free performances each summer and the shows are staged in Elmwood Park in Omaha, which borders University of Nebraska Omaha. In the fall, Nebraska Shakespeare also tours shorter versions of Shakespeare's plays to schools across Nebraska.
Shakespeare in the Park festivals | Omaha
The remains of an old Chautauqua building in Ashland's Lithia Park gave Bowmer the idea of staging Shakespeare plays on an outdoor Elizabethan stage. In 1935 he persuaded the government of Ashland to revive the tradition of July 4th celebrations with an important addition: a Shakespearean Festival. The Works Progress Administration helped construct a makeshift Elizabethan stage on the Chautauqua site and Bowmer, college students, teachers, and Ashland citizens mounted two plays, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, for three performances. Bowmer directed and played the roles of Shylock and Sir Toby Belch. Several hundred people attended the First Annual Shakespearean Festival.
Angus L. Bowmer | Beginnings of the Shakespeare Festival
Powers Boothe, Stephanie Beatriz, Daniel Davis, Jean Smart, Catherine E. Coulson, Harry Anderson, Edward Winter (actor), Enid Kent, Joel David Moore, Peter Frechette, Jay Karnes, Kim Rhodes, Laurence Ballard, Jeanne Paulsen, Ty Burrell, Gretchen Corbett, Eileen DeSandre, Bruce Abbott, Jenny Mollen, Jonathan Adams (American actor), Patrick Page, Anthony Lee (actor), George Peppard, Henry Woronicz, Larry Carpenter, Catherine Butterfield, Kelly AuCoin, George Hitchcock (poet), David L. Boushey, Jahnna N. Malcolm, Keith Fowler, Michael O'Sullivan (actor), Michelle Beck, Danny Bruno, Brandis Kemp, Linda Marshall, Frankie J. Alvarez, Margot Bennett (actress), Javier Muñoz (actor), Alma Martinez (actress), Jim B. Baker, Duane Boutte, Michael Winters (actor), Denis Arndt, Tala Ashe, Nico Santos (actor), Shona Tucker, Dennis Day (Mouseketeer), Sean S.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Alumni Actors
In August 2019, Bill Rauch left the position of Artistic Director. Nataki Garrett is his successor, and she is the sixth person to hold the position.
Production history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival | The 2010s
$896,000 was approved in April 1969, to match an equal amount to be raised through private donations. The fund drive quickly exceeded its goal and ground for the new theatre was broken on December 18, 1969. The theatre was ready just five months later and opened with a production of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," selected to recognize the Shakespearean origin of the Festival but to signal that the Festival also was ready to broaden its horizons by incorporating modern plays into its repertoire. Reinforcing that signal, "The Fantasticks" and "You Can't Take it with You" were also presented during that first six-week season.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Angus Bowmer Theatre
They transcribe interviews, help with actor auditions for visitors from other theatres and serve as attendants in the company fitness facility. Volunteers assist with access services such as data collection for periodic audience surveys. They help staff numerous events that comprise the annual Daedalus fund raiser (see above), drive company vehicles on specific errands, and direct traffic during dismantling and movement of sets into storage at the end of the season.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Volunteers
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival occupies a campus adjacent to Lithia Park and the Plaza in Ashland, Oregon. The primary buildings are the three theatres, Carpenter Hall, and the Camps, Pioneer, and Administration buildings, all surrounding an open central court, locally known as "The Bricks" that ties everything together into an architecturally coherent whole and facilitates movement. It also provides a stage for the nightly Green Shows (see above) from June through September. Other facilities include the Black Swan, which serves as a laboratory for the development of new plays, the production facility, the costume shop, classrooms, the Hay Patton Rehearsal Center, and the costume shop.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | OSF campus
The late Ruben Sierra, alumnus and former faculty member, created one of the country's first ethnic theatre companies, The Group Theatre (formerly the Group Theatre at the Ethnic Cultural Center), which was later led by Tim Bond, a directing graduate of the UW who served as associate artistic director at Oregon Shakespeare Festival for 11 years and producing artistic director for Syracuse Stage and who is now Artistic Director of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. Even the enormously successful Oregon Shakespeare Festival was founded by alum Angus L. Bowmer. More recently, the Washington Ensemble Theatre was founded in 2004 by nine alums representing every one of the school's programs.
University of Washington School of Drama | History
Angus Livingston Bowmer was born in Bellingham, Washington, on September 25, 1904. He was the only child of Charles C. Bowmer (born August 19, 1880, Nevada; died February 1967, Portland, Oregon) and Florence "Flora" Priest (born Dec 1880, Wisconsin; died June 5, 1958, Portland, Oregon). He moved with his family at least twice, living in Mount Vernon, Washington, in 1910 and Oak Harbor, Washington, by 1920. He graduated from the Washington State Normal School at Bellingham (now Western Washington University) in 1923. Bowmer attended the University of Washington in Seattle in the 1930s, acting in at least two of its Shakespeare productions, "Love's Labor's Lost" and "Cymbeline" under guest director Ben Iden Payne, an Englishman whose ideas for neo-Elizabethan staging of Shakespeare's plays provided inspiration later in Bowmer's life as he began producing the plays that became the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Angus L. Bowmer | Biography
OSF also provides a broad range of educational programs for middle schools, high schools, college students, teachers, and theatre professionals. The company consists of about 675 paid staff and 700 volunteers.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Overview
Abbott was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, where he graduated from David Douglas High School in 1972. His career began as a dancer and actor in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, where he spent three seasons from 1975 to 1978, appearing in productions of "A Winter's Tale", "All's Well That Ends Well", "Henry VI Part 2", "The Tempest", and "The Tragedy of King Richard III". He attended Portland State University, and later the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California.
Bruce Abbott | Early life
Each year, three plays are staged in the outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theatre, three or four in the intimate Thomas Theatre, and four or five in the traditional Angus Bowmer Theatre. OSF has completed the entire Shakespeare canon of 37 plays in 1958, 1978, 1997, and 2016.[1] It added non-Shakespearean plays in 1960. Since 2000 there has been at least one new work each season from playwrights such as Octavio Solis and Robert Schenkkan, several of which have gone on to other venues and numerous awards (see below). A complete list by year and theatre is available here: Production history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Overview
The festival has roots in the earliest days of the University of Colorado at Boulder, when senior classes performed commencement plays under a grove of cottonwood trees planted in the 1870s on the east lawn of the first building on campus, Old Main. When electric lights became available in 1901, the university began to stage evening performances. The tradition was interrupted by World War I and resumed in 1919 by George F. Reynolds, an Elizabethan theater scholar and professor of English Literature. In 1936, Reynolds helped develop plans to build the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre. Rippon (1850-1935) was the first female professor at the university and the first woman in the United States to teach at a state university.
Colorado Shakespeare Festival | 1870s-1944
The Southern Shakespeare Festival was founded by American entrepreneur Michael J Trout in November 1994 as the Florida Theater Project. In the summer of 1995, Michael Trout organized a touring company, led by David Klein. "Words...Words...Words: An Evening of Shakespeare" toured local theaters, regional high schools, and community arts centers. Trout then approached Florida State University Dean Emeritus Richard G. Fallon for his help to establish a free Shakespeare in the park festival, which Trout modeled after Joseph Papp's New York free Shakespeare-in-the-park. The Tallahassee festival and Renaissance fair ran from 1996 to 2000 as an open-air, free festival and Renaissance fair located in the downtown area behind Tallahassee's City Hall in Kleman Plaza.
Southern Shakespeare Festival | History
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, directed by Andrew J. Traister.
The Birthday Party (play) | 1981
Bing Crosby served as an honorary director of the Festival from 1949 to 1951. Charles Laughton visited in 1961, saying "I have just seen the four best productions of Shakespeare that I have ever seen in my life." Laughton begged to play King Lear, but died in 1962 before he could fulfill the dream. Stacy Keach was a cast member in 1962 and 1963. Duke Ellington and his orchestra presented a benefit concert in 1966 that brought many luminaries to Ashland.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | History
An April 1968 report by the Bureau of Business and Economic Research of the University of Oregon pointed to the lost economic opportunity represented by the thousands of people the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was turning away each year. It further noted that the Festival had become an important economic engine for southern Oregon, and recommended addition of an indoor theatre. This led the City of Ashland to apply to the Economic Development Administration of the Department of Commerce in Fall 1968 for a $1,792,000 project grant with the Angus Bowmer Theatre as the keystone. The plan also called for a parking building, a remodeled administration building and box office, a scene shop and exhibit hall that later would become the OSF Black Swan, landscaping, and street realignment.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Angus Bowmer Theatre
The show made its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon on June 3, 2015, with an opening on June 13. The production ran until October 10 and was directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar. In 2016, Michael Mayer replaced Iskandar as director. Also joining the re-imagined creative team were music supervisor Tom Kitt (who previously worked with Mayer on American Idiot) and Magruder to adapt Whitty's original libretto.
Head over Heels (musical) | Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2015)
When Bowmer died in 1979, the OSF had performed Shakespeare's entire canon twice.
Angus L. Bowmer | Beginnings of the Shakespeare Festival
Subsequently, however, the Festival received grants from both Paul Newman's Own PEN Center, the Dramatists Guild of America, and other sympathetic sources nationwide.
Texas Shakespeare Festival | Productions
Jerry Turner (1927–2004) served as artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from 1971 to 1991. He transformed the festival from a summer program for semi-professional actors into one of the top regional theaters in the country by leading the Ashland, Oregon-based company beyond its Shakespearean repertoire. He produced plays by Bertold Brecht, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and August Strindberg and added the Angus Bowmer Theatre in 1970 and the Black Swan in 1977 to the festival's original theater, the Elizabethan Stage.
Jerry Turner (theater director) | Introduction
The professional staff is augmented by approximately 700 volunteers, some also members of other organizations, who contribute approximately 37,000 hours each year. Volunteers help patrons as roving Bricks Ambassadors who welcome visitors to the campus and answer their questions, staff the Welcome Center and Green Show information table, facilitate informal post-matinee discussions, provide concierge services for visiting student groups, and serve as volunteer ushers and ticket takers in the three theatres. Behind the scenes, volunteers help in the archives, box office, costume shop, costume warehouse, development office, fitness center, light shop, mail room, marketing office, scene shop as well as with office tasks such as copying, filing, preparing mailings and sorting incoming mail.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Volunteers
In 2014, Plummer presented "A Word or Two" again, at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles.
Christopher Plummer | Stratford Festival
In 1931, Bowmer was invited to become an instructor in English at Southern Oregon Normal School, a predecessor to Southern Oregon University, in Ashland, Oregon. Bowmer married Gertrude Butler prior to enlisting in the Army July 20, 1942, where he served as a Warrant Officer. After serving his country and returning to Oregon, Bowmer organized theater activities in Ashland and continued teaching at the college until he retired in 1971. Bowmer befriended Fred C. Adams who came to Ashland to observe the festival's operations prior to Adams founding the Utah Shakespearean Festival in 1961.
Angus L. Bowmer | Biography
From 1971 to 1976 he lived in Ashland, Oregon, performing magic and working with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Harry Anderson | Early life
Several theaters underwent name changes for the 2013 season. The New Theatre finally gained a formal name as the Thomas Theatre. The Elizabethan Stage and Allen were united under one name as the Allen Elizabethan Theatre, thanks to a $3 Million grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. In 2014, the Festival announced their Canon in a Decade initiative. In the next ten years, from 2015 to 2024, the Festival would be producing the complete Shakespeare Canon to honor the 80th anniversary of the festival. This project is in progress, and may have been affected by shut downs due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Production history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival | The 2010s
The Festival began in 2000 and is now in its 17th year.
Shakespeare Schools Festival | History
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has grown from a summer outdoor series in the 1930s to a season that stretches from February to October, incorporating Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays at three theaters. The OSF has become the largest regional repertory theater in the United States. The Oregon Cabaret Theater features musicals and comedy throughout the year. Opened in 1986, the dinner theater occupies a former First Baptist Church built in Mission Revival style. The Ashland Independent Film Festival, which shows international and domestic films of almost every genre, takes place each April in the Varsity Theatre downtown. About 90 films are shown during the five days of the festival.
Ashland, Oregon | Arts and culture
Murnau, shot on location in Athena, Oregon (with a score composed by John Paul and performed by a string quartet; "A Soldier's Tale" by Penny Allen, and James Ivory's first international hit film "Shakespeare Wallah", with James Ivory attending. The special Oregon Cartoon Institute Day at the festival featured Bill Plympton.
Marylhurst University | Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival
The remainder of the building is given over to downstairs and upstairs lobbies, concessions, access distribution, archives (see below), storage, laundry room, green room, quiet room, warm-up room, dressing space for 18 actors, showers/restrooms, costume and wig rooms, stage manager's office, maintenance space, and storage for props and set pieces.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Thomas Theatre
Santa Cruz Shakespeare is an annual professional theatre festival in Santa Cruz, California, founded in 2014. Its predecessor, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, lost the financial support of its host and sponsor, the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2013. Members of the original company immediately began fundraising and raised enough money to relaunch the festival as an independent entity.
Santa Cruz Shakespeare | Introduction
In 1976, founder Doug Copsey noted a green-space in downtown Boise, Idaho that could function as an outdoor performance area. The first performance of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival premiered in the summer of 1977 in the plaza outside the One Capital Center. The festival presented its first seasons in partnership with the Main Street Bistro, later known as Ray's Oasis. In the first years of the Festival, the only plays produced were works of William Shakespeare.
Production history of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival | One Capital Center (1977-1980)
Angus L. Bowmer retired in 1971, and leadership of the Festival passed to Jerry Turner, who widened the Festival repertory to production of classics by the likes of Molière, Ibsen, and Chekhov. When Turner retired in 1991, actor/director Henry Woronicz took control through 1996. OSF then recruited Libby Appel from the highly respected Indiana Repertory Theatre. She served as Artistic Director from 1996 through 2007. Bill Rauch succeeded Libby Appel as Artistic Director, serving from 2008 to 2019. He incorporated musicals and non-western plays into the annual selection, and sought connections between classic plays and contemporary concerns. He also started the Black Swan Lab in which 15-20 OSF actors developed new works for the stage.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Artistic Directors
Williamson earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Eastern Michigan University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.
Afton Williamson | Early life
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley began as the dream of Robert Kelley, a Bay Area native who earned his degree in creative writing from Stanford University in 1968. After teaching at Andover Prep in Massachusetts for a year, Kelley returned to Palo Alto, California in 1970. As a musician and occasional actor, Kelley decided he wanted to make his living doing theatre. He got his chance when the city of Palo Alto then asked him to launch a theatre program that would engage teenagers and reflect the concerns of the community. The result was a powerful and original new musical called, "Popcorn", which premiered in July 1970.
TheatreWorks (Silicon Valley) | Beginnings - 1970s
Fowler was born in San Francisco in 1939. He began acting professionally with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (1958 and 1960), playing Antony in "Julius Caesar" and Lorenzo in "Merchant" (with OSF founder Angus Bowmer as Shylock), before leaving to study as a Fulbright scholar at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. In England, he directed the Midlands premiere of Brecht's "Mother Courage". The production at the Stratford Hippodrome in spring 1961 led the town's veteran drama critic to compliment the local troupe for daring a type of theater that Sir Peter Hall hesitated to bring to Stratford's just-founded Royal Shakespeare Company.
Keith Fowler | Early career
The limitations stemming from adapting an existing building as the Black Swan led to the design and building of a third theatre that provided flexible seating and increased capacity while maintaining the intimacy of the Black Swan. Opened in March 2002 and originally named the New Theatre, it was renamed the Thomas Theatre in 2013 as a result of a generous $4.5 million gift from a group of donors. The name recognizes the contributions of longtime OSF development director Peter Thomas, who died in March 2010. The Thomas Theatre expands the possibilities for experiment and innovation while maintaining the intimacy of the Black Swan, no seat being more than six rows from the stage.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Thomas Theatre
The group began the First Canadian Shakespeare Festival, which opened on June 27, 1949, with a performance of "As You Like It", at the University of Toronto's Trinity College quadrangle. Two years later, the Grey's planted a mulberry tree, alleged to have been taken from the root of the tree supposedly planted by Shakespeare at his last residence, the New Place. With the formation of the Earle Grey Shakespeare Festival, it supplanted the Shakespeare Society of Toronto as the primary source of Shakespeare in Canada. Its primacy was short-lived, however, with the creation of the Stratford Festival in 1953, which quickly grew to the largest Shakespeare festival in the country.
Earle Grey Players | Earle Grey Shakespeare Festival
Free Shakespeare in the Park began in San Francisco in 1983, with its debut production of The Tempest in Golden Gate Park. Produced every year in San Francisco, Pleasanton, Cupertino, and Redwood City from July through September, this program stages professional theater free of charge throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Shakespeare in the Park festivals | San Francisco
All playgoers are offered a complimentary "Playbill" with a synopsis of the plays, cast lists, artist biographies, and directors' statements. All members receive spring, summer, and fall issues of "Prologue", containing articles on directors, actors, costumes, props, and plays. "Illuminations", a comprehensive guide to each year's plays, is sold in the Tudor Guild gift shop and given to higher-level donors. "Illuminations" includes synopses, themes, information on playwrights and historical and other contextual information. Each year, the Festival publishes "Teachers First!" providing information on the season's plays, including age suitability, the seasonal calendar, ordering and discount information. The annual "Souvenir Program" includes photographic highlights of each play and special articles along with pictures and biographies of actors, playwrights, and the many people who work behind the scenes.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Publications
As a Guest Director at The University of Washington in the summer of 1930, he staged Shakespeare's Cymbeline and Love's Labour's Lost on an Elizabethan style, on a temporary Thrust stage. The productions inspired a young graduate student, Angus L. Bowmer, who acted in and staged managed the productions. Bowmer went on to incorporate these staging concepts when he founded the Oregon Shakespeare Festival five years later. Payne directed Shakespeare's Cymbeline at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1956, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1961. In 1934, Payne and Thomas Woods Stevens edited and produced several short (one hour) productions of Shakespeare plays that were presented during the second year of the Chicago World's Fair (Century of Progress) at a crude reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe Theater.
Ben Iden Payne | Inspiration on other theaters
The Shakespeare Theatre Association of America was organized at a meeting held January 12 and 13, 1991 at the Folger Library and the Kennedy Center, Washington DC. Sidney Berger, Producing Director of the Houston Shakespeare Festival, and Douglas Cook, Producing Artistic Director of the Utah Shakespearean Festival, invited the producers, artistic directors and managing directors of over thirty-seven Shakespeare festivals and companies from the United States and Canada to this meeting. Berger was elected the first President, and Cook the first Vice President.
Shakespeare Theatre Association | History
The Sacramento Shakespeare Festival is an annual Shakespeare festival produced by City Theatre at Sacramento City College in Sacramento, California, United States.
Sacramento Shakespeare Festival | Introduction
In California he worked for the Santa Clara Shakespeare Festival for seven years. Stiers relocated to New York City in the 1960s to study at the Juilliard School (Drama Division "Group 1": 1968–1972). During his studies, Stiers was mentored by actor John Houseman, whose City Center Acting Company he later joined.
David Ogden Stiers | Early life
The Festival was founded in 1961, presented its first season in 1962. It is one of the oldest and largest Shakespearean festivals in North America. The Festival is located in Cedar City, Utah, a community of approximately 28,000 people, and is within a day's drive of seven national parks and numerous national and state forests, monuments, and recreation areas. Via Interstate-15, it is two and a half hours northeast of Las Vegas, Nevada and three and a half hours south of Salt Lake City, Utah. The Festival is located on and around the Southern Utah University campus.
Utah Shakespeare Festival | History
The Festival opened the 2020 season on February 28. On March 11, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the performances and remaining openings of all shows to be cancelled indefinitely. By the end of March, the Festival was hoping to present a smaller season that would open Labor Day weekend. The plan was to present the four shows that had already opened with the addition of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" in the outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theatre. On May 8, it became apparent that ongoing social distancing restrictions in Oregon would prohibit a fall season and all shows for 2020 were cancelled.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Productions
Also in this area are offices and fitting rooms for the costume designers and costume design assistants, a costume props area and a vented paint room. Upstairs is a dye room, lounge, laundry, storage room, and office. During the height of costume production each season, a wig shop and additional studio is open in the basement of the Angus Bowmer Theatre. The Festival acquired Carpenter Hall (I) in October 1973, renovating it to accommodate lectures, concerts, rehearsals, meetings and Festival and community events. The Bill Patton Garden (K) provides the venue for free informal summer noon talks by OSF actors and staff.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Other buildings
OSF is a constituent of Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for the not-for-profit theatre world, and a member of the Shakespeare Theatre Association of America. It operates under contracts with Actors' Equity Association, The Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, Inc., an independent national labor union.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Professional memberships
Under Yang, the festival began hiring professional designers, technicians and directors with national reputations, including Robert Benedetti, Audrey Stanley and Tom Markus. Yang also hired graduate students from around the country, moving beyond the confines of CU-Boulder, and in 1982 hired the first Equity actor under a “guest artist contract.” With such changes, CSF's reputation began to grow. Shakespeare Quarterly remarked that the festival “had stepped out of its academic cocoon” in its Summer 1980 issue and in 1989 praised its experimentation, from “Hamlet in outer space, to topless witches in Macbeth, to a commedia dell’arte Shrew.” In 1992, CSF was named as one of the top Shakespeare festivals in the nation by Time magazine.
Colorado Shakespeare Festival | 1980s
After establishing residence in Manhattan, Julia had to do several odd jobs to pay for his expenses, going as far as receiving training on the proper way to sell pens for a distributor. When Hurst visited him, both attended a Broadway play and the fact that he could work as an actor full-time surprised him. As a result of this, Julia began seeking employment in both Broadway and "Off-Broadway" plays. Seeking to further improve his acting, he took lessons from Wynn Handman, who was recommended by Bean; his class included future fellow star Christopher Walken.
Raul Julia | New York Shakespeare Festival
In 1998, Terra Nova was joined by modern dance troupe Dance Kaleidoscope. This collaboration continued through 2007. In still another innovation by Bill Rauch, the Green Show was revamped in 2008. The shows now vary widely with performers such as a dance group from Mexico or India one night, clowns doing ballet on stilts the next, and a classical music quartet on another. A fire show, juggler, or magician might be seen along with improv, metal, or rock-n-roll variations on Shakespeare. Individual performers, groups, choirs, bands, and orchestras may present Afro-Cuban, baroque, blues, classical, contemporary, cowboy, funk, gospel, hip-hop, jazz, mariachi, marimba, poetry, marionette, renaissance, or salsa, sometimes combined in unexpected ways.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Green Show
The Festival opened the 2020 season on February 28. On March 11, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the performances and remaining openings of all shows to be cancelled indefinitely. By the end of March, the Festival was hoping to present a smaller season that would open Labor Day weekend. The plan was to present the four shows that had already opened with the addition of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" in the outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theatre. On May 8, it became apparent that ongoing social distancing restrictions in Oregon would prohibit a fall season and all shows for 2020 were cancelled.
Production history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival | The 2020s
The Angus Bowmer Theatre seats between 592 and 610 patrons depending on configuration. Although about half the size of the outdoor theatre, it more than doubled audience capacity by making it possible to hold matinee performances and to extend the season into spring and fall.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Angus Bowmer Theatre
James Sandoe and Jack Crouch, professor in the Department of English and Speech and head of CU's Creative Arts Festival, began to discuss the possibility of creating an annual Shakespeare festival on campus. Crouch took over in 1947, after which Shakespeare plays were performed in the Rippon theater every year except for 1957, when the annual production was staged in the indoor University Theater. Crouch directed seven plays over the next 10 years and founded the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, which premiered on Aug. 2, 1958, and featured three productions: "Julius Caesar, Hamlet," and "The Taming of the Shrew". More than 7,000 patrons attended 13 performances that year, paying $1.50 per ticket.
Colorado Shakespeare Festival | 1940s to 1960s
Henry Woronicz (; born 1954) is an American actor, director, and producer who was formerly the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from 1991 to 1995. He was an actor and resident director there starting in 1984. In addition to his work at OSF, he has acted and directed in many other theaters, and has extensive film and TV credits.
Henry Woronicz | Introduction
The Allen Elizabethan Theatre has evolved since the founding of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when the first performance of "Twelfth Night" was presented on July 2, 1935.
Allen Elizabethan Theatre | Introduction
Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival (now called Shakespeare in the Park) in 1954, with the aim of making Shakespeare's works accessible to the public. In 1957, he was granted the use of Central Park for free productions of Shakespeare's plays. These Shakespeare in the Park productions continue after his death at the open-air Delacorte Theatre every summer in Central Park.
Joseph Papp | Career
Terrence O’Brien is an American theatre director. O'Brien is a graduate of University of Notre Dame, and received advanced training in acting and directing at American Conservatory Theater, A.C.T. in San Francisco. He is the Founding Artistic Director of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, which began in 1987 with a modest outdoor production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, produced in cooperation with the 29th Street Project. In 1988, the Festival moved to Boscobel, a Hudson River museum estate in Garrison, New York. Once in its new home and under a big tent, the festival grew dramatically, from its first season audience of 230 to 37,000 in 2010.
Terrence O'Brien (director) | Introduction
Shakespeare Santa Cruz was an annual professional theatre festival in Santa Cruz, California, which ran from 1981 to 2013. After losing the financial support of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the company was relaunched through crowdfunding as Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
Shakespeare Santa Cruz | Introduction
In Southern Oregon, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, held in Ashland, is also a tourist draw, as is the Oregon Vortex and the Wolf Creek Inn State Heritage Site, a historic inn where Jack London wrote his 1913 novel "Valley of the Moon".
Oregon | Tourism and entertainment
In 1960, Joseph Papp invited Gersten to work with him at the New York Shakespeare Festival. The job as associate producer became a full-time job in 1964. This began a long partnership during which Papp and Gersten established the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) at the old Astor Library downtown while presenting a series of significant productions. During his tenure at the NYSF, it would become the pre-eminent non-profit theater in the United States. (Gersten would also produce at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont and Mitzi E. Newhouse (prior to 1973 the Forum) theaters during NYSF’s tenure there between 1974 and 1977.) The eighteen year Papp/Gersten regime at the NYSF would usher in a bold new era of playwriting and musical theater.
Bernard Gersten | New York Shakespeare Festival
The Black Swan (G on the OSF campus map above) served as the Festival's third theatre from 1977 to 2001. The building, originally an automobile dealership, was bought in 1969 as a scene shop and rehearsal hall. Company members began using it to stage "midnight" readings for one another and invited friends who brought other friends. Artistic Director Jerry Turner recognized the opportunity to take risks with unconventional staging and subjects, and called for its development as a third OSF theatre. Fitting a theatre into the existing building was challenging. It could hold only 138 seats, all within five rows of the stage.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Black Swan
Gregio (Editor), 2004.
Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival | Recognition
In 1979, Berkeley Shakespeare Festival began Summer with Shakespeare programs, six-week camps for ages 14–18, culminating with a performance in the John Hinkel Park amphitheater. The camps have continued, in one form or another, to this day, going under several different names (Camp, Conservatory, Summer Theater Programs). In 2009, the camps were offered to ages 8–18 in two- and five-week increments, with locations in Lafayette, Oakland, Orinda, and El Cerrito. Participants study acting, physical comedy, stage combat, movement, improvisation, and text, and the camps still culminate in a Shakespeare performance by each age group. Also in 1979, the festival began holding fall classes, a training program in all facets of classical theater including voice and movement, period style, scansion, stage combat, and other production aspects.
California Shakespeare Theater | Artistic learning
Columbia University Professor John McWhorter pointed out that Shakespeare's language is no longer entirely ours. Granted, he says, with the help of notes and time to study them, you can work out the sense of some of the obscure dialogue, but not in a theatre in a matter of seconds while the action speeds by and the actors deliver the lines with all the urgency of the moment, then move on. Other scholars argued that it is time for versions that will do for a contemporary English-speaking public what has been done for much of the world where Shakespeare is performed in the native language of the audience—make every word intelligible.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Play on!
The Ashland New Plays Festival (ANPF) is a nonprofit organization in Ashland, Oregon that encourages playwrights in the creation of new works through public readings. The organization was founded in 1992 and is managed by a volunteer board of directors and artistic board, ANPF's flagship festival is a playwright competition that culminates in the reading of four new plays culled from hundreds of submissions. The festival features professional actors from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the community. In 2011 more than 200 playwrights participated through submissions and at the festival.
Ashland New Plays Festival | Introduction
In addition to the plays, since 1951 a free outdoor "Green Show" drawing audiences of 600 to 1200, often including non-playgoers, precedes the evening plays from June through September, Wednesday through Saturday nights, from a modular steel stage with a sprung floor for the dancers, a removable wheelchair ramp for performers with disabilities, and built-in storage facilities that eliminate carting equipment from and to distant storage facilities. Originally, it offered Elizabethan music and dancers. From 1966 until 2007 it consisted of three Renaissance-themed shows in rotation inspired by the plays showing in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre. Beginning in 1990, live music was supplied by resident ensemble The Terra Nova Consort, with numerous guest musicians, and Elizabethan dancers.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Green Show
The Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival, (the professional theatre in residence at the University of Notre Dame), is a direct outgrowth of an experimental course called "Shakespeare in Performance" created in 1989 by Dr. Paul Rathburn, NDSF's founder. The premise of this course was that Shakespeare's works are both theatrical scripts and literary texts and are illuminated best through work in both the theater and in the classroom. It began in the summer of 2000 with the program's inaugural production, "The Taming of the Shrew", but has since evolved to include guest artists and productions, the ShakeScenes community program, and a Young Company production produced and staffed entirely by Notre Dame and Saint Mary's students.
Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival | History