The Colorado Shakespeare Festival is a professional acting company in association with the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was established in 1958, making it one of the oldest such festivals in the United States, and has roots going back to the early 1900s.
Each summer, the festival draws about 25,000 patrons to see the works of Shakespeare, as well as classics and contemporary plays, in the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre and indoor University Theatre.
The company is made up of professional actors, directors, designers and artisans from around the United States and the world, along with student interns from around the nation.
Timothy Orr, the current producing artistic director, was hired in 2014 after serving as an actor in the company since 2007 and associate producing artistic director since 2011.
In early April 2020, with the uncertainty of the ongoing worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, CSF cancelled the summer 2020 season altogether. It resumed in 2022. In 2023, renovations to the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater were announced.
History
1870s-1944
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 is believed to have been the first woman in the United States to teach at a state university. She was chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and also served, without financial compensation, as Dean of Women.
After her death, University President George Norlin suggested that a planned outdoor theater be named in Rippon's honor. Construction began in 1936 with funding from the Board of Regents and the federal Works Progress Administration, as well as private donations. “Alumni Day” celebrations were held in the still-incomplete theater on June 13, 1936.
The Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre was officially completed in 1939, but no plays were staged there until 1944, when book reviewer, Shakespeare scholar and associate director of libraries in charge of acquisitions James Sandoe was asked to direct a play. Because the University Theatre was occupied by the Department of the Navy due to the war effort, Sandoe, also influential in developing the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, decided to stage Romeo and Juliet in the outdoor theater. The event was so popular that it was followed by The Merchant of Venice in 1945 and Henry IV, Part I in 1946.
Sandoe directed nine seasons for CSF between 1961 and 1973. No director helmed more productions until Department of Theatre and Dance professor James Symons pushed the mark to 11 in recent years. However, no one to date—70 years later—has directed more productions of Shakespeare's plays on the Mary Rippon stage. All four of Sandoe's children appeared in the CSF; son Sam Sandoe and daughter Anne Sandoe continue to act in the festival each summer.
1940s to 1960s
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. The following year, more than 13,000 people attended.
By the end of its first decade, CSF had produced 26 of the 37 plays in the canon, with only one duplication, Hamlet in 1965. Howard M. Banks’ production of Henry V was filmed for television in 1961.