Colorado Shakespeare Festival moves indoors during theater renovations

BOULDER — Colorado Shakespeare Festival is taking its three performances indoors this summer while construction is underway on the outdoor amphitheater.

“We’re producing a three-show repertory season with ‘Macbeth,’ ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ and a lesser known title, ‘Arden of Faversham,’ which might be written by William Shakespeare,” said Tim Orr, producing artistic director of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, a professional theater company affiliated with the University of Colorado Boulder. “We usually have five shows, three outside and two inside. There’s fewer because of less space.”

During the 2024 and 2025 seasons, shows will be entirely in the newly renovated Roe Green Theatre, a traditional indoor proscenium theater built in 1991 that seats 400. It has upgraded acoustics and an improved climate-control system. The outdoor theater, built in the late 1930s, seats 1,000 and is called the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre.

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“Back in the 1940s, a small group of faculty members here produced Shakespeare plays in the beautiful space,” Orr said. “It became suddenly very popular. There was a great turnout.”

In 1958, the performers wanted to make their work formal and called the summer theater the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, which today is the second oldest Shakespeare festival in the U.S. behind the Antioch Shakespeare Festival at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, founded in 1952.

“The success or longevity of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is due to the quality of the work this festival has always put on stage and the beauty of the space of the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre,” Orr said, pointing out features like “the Rocky Mountains behind the stage and the stars overhead and being in such a beautiful environment in Boulder.”

The outdoor theater is part of a renovation project that started last August and involves renovating the surrounding buildings, building a new stage and improving the overall space. Building improvements will include the backstage and support spaces surrounding the theater, plus there will be new lighting towers and truss work, two patio spaces off the central node of the building, an indoor café space for concession sales, and improved access and pathways around the seating area. 

“It will be a vastly improved space for audiences to enjoy live theater outside,” Orr said, adding that the indoor and outdoor theaters both offer “great experiences.” 

“Indoors it never rains. It’s a very comfortable space,” he said. “Sometimes at night, it’s cold outside. It’s a luxurious experience being indoors, while outdoors is quite magical. … The stage is huge, and the scale of it all is big and heroic.”

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival typically performs three to four plays by Shakespeare and one to two modern, contemporary plays during the summer season, which runs June to August. 

“Shakespeare is timeless and timely, always,” Orr said. “I think he’s one of the best-known playwrights in existence. His work is not written to be read but written to be watched and heard.”

Sixteen actors will be performing in the three plays during the 2024 season, with all offering “a completely satisfying night in the theater,” he said. 

“The thrill of live theater with suspense, drama and great comedy, I recommend seeing all three,” Orr said.

“Macbeth” will start the season with shows June 8 to Aug. 11 and will be directed by Wendy Franz, managing director of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. A tragedy, the play starts with three witches, or weird sisters, delivering a prophecy in three parts to Scottish General Macbeth, who must decide to let destiny take its course or conspire with Lady Macbeth to pursue fortune’s favor. 

“It’s one of the tightest, most exciting scripts, and if it’s done well, it can be a really satisfying theatrical experience for a wide range of people,” Franz said. “It sets out to bring action, humanity and the highs and lows and catharsis people want from a play. … There’s more psychological depth and nuance to the characters.”

Orr considers “Macbeth” to be one of Shakespeare’s best plays, which the theater company hasn’t performed for more than 10 years, since it’s a challenge to start the play in daylight but then have evening turn the stage dark.

“‘Macbeth’ is full of the supernatural. It’s scary, and there’s elements of mystery, horror and ghosts,” Orr said, adding that an indoor environment allows for more control of the play’s “theatrical magic.” “This is a great time to explore and produce ‘Macbeth.’”

Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s next show will be “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” another play the company hasn’t done for more than 10 years. The play, which will be staged July 6 to Aug. 11 and directed by Kevin Rich, tells the story of Sir John Falstaff, an overweight and vain knight on the hunt for a wealthy wife or two. He wants to woo them to finance his frivolity and fun, but he gets tricked by the husbands and servants of the quick-witted mistresses Page and Ford. 

“Since we had to be inside, we had the idea of producing ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ as a sitcom with a live audience,” Orr said. “The design of the show is reminiscent of sitcoms of the ’70s and ’80s. … ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ is unlike the rest of Shakespeare, since there are no royals or aristocracy. This show is about middle-class people much like American sitcoms.”

The final show “Arden of Faversham,” an early true crime play by Anonymous, will be presented July 28 with Shunté Lofton as the actor manager. The play, written during Shakespeare’s time, is a thriller that tells the story of a woman’s pact with her lover to murder her husband.

“Originally, it was presented outdoors,” Orr said. “It really would work well in an indoor space. This is a great opportunity to do it, and it fits well with ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Merry Wives of Windsor.’”

Orr describes the play as a dark thriller inhabiting interior spaces.

“It’s more entertaining to watch indoors because of the dark interior, the spaces and the subject matter,” Orr said.

The plays of Shakespeare, which fall into three categories — tragedies, comedies and histories — speak to the human experience and offer audiences much to learn, Franz said. She and the other performers work hard to make sure to tell each of Shakespeare’s stories in a way that’s relevant to the city of Boulder and to the current times, she said.

“We work to make sure our productions speak to why it is essential to tell these stories here and now,” Franz said. “Our productions should wrestle with questions that our culture is facing in this moment. We seek to interrogate those questions in ways that are meaningful to both our audiences and the artists we collaborate with.” 

“I love sitting in the theater watching the play, and I also love watching the audience watch the play. That might be my favorite,” Orr said. “If you have not experienced Colorado Shakespeare Festival before, you don’t know what you’re missing. Come join us.”

Tickets for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival are available at https://cupresents.org/series/shakespeare-festival/, over the phone at 303-492-8008 and at the CU Presents box office 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday.