"Let me be that I am and seek not to alter me."

There was an interesting (and impassioned) article in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday.  My apologies to the Oxfordians out there....

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/wouldnt-it-be-cool-if-shakespeare-wasnt-shakespeare.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=magazine&src=me

" for the world is broad and wide..."

In the last four years, we've done four non-Shakespearean plays, and you might ask "If it’s a Shakespeare Festival, why do a play that’s not by Shakespeare?”  There’s one very good reason.  It’s good business.  

Much as it pains me to say it, there are folks who are put off by Shakespeare - who are reluctant to commit to an evening with the Bard.  So, we have to woo them!  The non-Shakespeares are a way to do that.  They tend to sell well and bring out a different audience.  And that’s good for us.  New people get introduced to our space, our actors, and all the fun of coming out to Ewing.  We hope they'll have such a good time that they can't resist coming back for a different show...one by that guy from Stratford!

To put some hard facts to all this...last summer, our non-Shakespeare production was Complete Works of Shakespeare - Abridged, and it sold at around 81%.  If we take out the figures for the rained out show, the percentage is closer to 87%.  We only had three houses that were under 80% for this show - all of them early in the season when we traditionally have smaller houses.

In contrast, The Winter's Tale played at 68% and Romeo and Juliet at 66%.  There were more performances of R&J, so the percentages are a little misleading - we actually did more traffic for the story of the young lovers.  But even with the popularity of R&J (and we saw a lot more teens coming through the gate for this show), it didn't hit the numbers of Complete Works.

What's most important is that some of the patrons who "tried us out" by seeing Complete Works came back to see one of the other shows.  When we did Complete Works four years ago, one new patron told me that he'd never seen a Shakespeare play in his life, but that he now wanted to read and see them all.  That was a wonderful thing to hear!

It’s important for every theatre to continue to expand its audience base - to bring in younger people and those folks who "don't go to theatre."  Our non-Shakespeares are one way the Festival can do it.


We are not alone, by the way, in this move away from all-Shakespeare, as a survey of any of the major summer Shakespeare festivals will show.  Utah Shakes even featured the following link to an article about this on the homepage of their web site early last summer.  It's worth a read:

http://www.denverpost.com/commented/ci_18385720?source=commented-entertainment

And by the way, the Illinois Shakespeare did its first non-Shakespeare in 1989.  The play was She Stoops to Conquer - like The Rivals, a very funny English play!

Next week, I'll have some things to say about our morning shows for families.  Until then... 

"I'll have these Players play something like..."

So, we're off and running with plans for the summer 2012 season.  We're calling it our season of love, lies, deceit, and secret identities - As You Like It, Othello, The Rivals (by Richard Brinsley Sheridan), and a 55-minute family-friendly version of Comedy of Errors.  It promises to be exciting.  

I'm often asked how we choose a season.  The process of selecting this one began over a year ago.  First stop - a look at our production history to see which plays were "moving into rotation."  Shakespeare left us only 37 published plays, so we come back to our favorites again and again.  The Festival has done some of the most popular - Midsummer, Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet - more than 10 times in its 34 year history.

Of course, no matter how much we love a play or how interested we might be to see how the next artistic team will attack it, we want to give them all a regular rest.  Generally, we wait six years or more to bring any play back.  That automatically took 15 plays out of the running for 2012.  (I'll include a list of our full production history later.)

The comedies are very popular with our audiences, so we do one almost every year.  In some ways, selection of the comedy is easy since there are a finite number of Shakespearean comedies.  As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, Love's Labors Lost, Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and Two Gentlemen of Verona - that's about it.  The Merchant of Venice is sometimes classified as a comedy, too, but it's hard to see it as funny today.

Warming up in the bullpen this year were As You Like It, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Twelfth Night.  Twelfth Night was questionable because we'd done it in 2005 - so it's just barely out of its six year hiatus.  And we did Two Gents last year at ISU, so some of our audience had seen it recently.  AYLI seemed a good pick.  It's a comedy but has interesting things to say about politics and power - great for an election year.  And it has a number of great roles for young women - Rosalind, Celia, Audrey, and Phoebe - an important consideration for 2012 because the Festival is part of the School of Theatre at Illinois State University, and this year there will be four actresses from the graduate acting program auditioning for the Festival.  While there's no guarantee that they'll get one of these roles, I want to give them something to shoot for.  (Those of you who saw the shows last summer saw these women on stage doing amazing work in roles large and small.)

Once AYLI was on the list, I started looking at the histories and tragedies - something to balance out the comedy.  I'd heard quite a few requests for a history play from patrons last summer.  We haven't done Henry IV, Part 1 in a long time (since 1994), so that went under serious consideration.  But it has a very large cast and that would mean hiring 3 to 4 more actors than we did last year.  Additional costs would include housing them and putting all those extra bodies in costumes.  That didn't seem like a smart economic decision right now.  I was also very interested in Troilus and Cressida.  In 34 years, we've never found occasion to do this one.  It's a difficult play and pretty dark, but also powerful, with great resonance for our contemporary American culture.  Unfortunately, this one has a large cast, too - and would probably not be a big seller.

And that matters.  While it would be nice to let our artistic desires completely dictate our choices, theatre has the same concerns as every other business.  We have to make sure we aren't spending more money than we can bring in through ticket sales, contributions, and grants.  A balance has to be struck...which is why it often takes so long to come up with a good season - one that serves the Festival artistically as well as financially.

Eventually, we settled on Othello.  It's a great play - one of my favorites - a big emotional play with strong cultural and political undercurrents.  And it has one of Shakespeare's greatest villains!   It's always a challenge to find a good Othello - but I feel confident we'll find the right actor for this.

So, that's our two Shakespeares on the big stage.  I'll leave discussion of our non-Shakespeare selection for the next posting.  And in the posting after that, I'll chat about our Theatre for Young Audiences show.  Until next time...