Milestones Icon: Colorado Shakespeare Festival

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears – for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is one of the oldest cultural programs in Boulder.

The festival takes place every summer on the University of Colorado campus and produces several of the Bard’s works, as well as classic plays from other writers, other times, and other cultures. It draws up to 40,000 audience members for the summer season and holiday play.

The festival unofficially began in 1944, when CU Shakespeare teacher and bibliographer James Sandoe was asked to direct a play for the coming summer. He produced “Romeo & Juliet,” and because the indoor University Theatre facility was being occupied by the Navy for the war effort, he used his second choice of the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre.

It was successful enough that he went on to produce Shakespeare plays at the outdoor theater for the next couple of years, and a tradition was born.

English professor Jack Crouch took over in 1947, and officially dubbed the tradition the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in 1958. That year, “Julius Caesar,” “Hamlet” and the “Taming of the Shrew” were produced.

 In 1975, the festival completed Shakespeare’s canon of 37 plays with the production of “Cymbeline” – the first time an American company had done so.

The festival draws talent from all over the world, and as many as 180 individuals work together in the early summer to pull it off.

Some of the plays take place at the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre under the stars, with others staged indoors in the University Theatre main stage. Recent innovations include subtle electronic audio enhancement and wonderfully comfortable seating in the Mary Rippon and the introduction of gourmet picnic fare on the Green.

Summertime picnicking is a tradition almost as old as the festival itself.

The 2011 summer season includes “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Comedy of Errors.”

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