A California Online Magazine with Local Focus and Global Appeal
Another season of the Woodward Shakespeare Festival is almost upon us so we took a moment to chat with this season’s production manager Richard Adamson, who will also be directing this year’s production of Anthony and Cleopatra.
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It’s a happy day on the beach in Long Beach, California, when the fleet returns in 1944 in the Woodward Shakespeare Festival’s light-hearted season closer, Much Ado About Nothing, playing on the Festival Stage in Fresno through August 25.
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Another season of the Woodward Shakespeare Festival begins next month. KRL took a moment to interview their new
Executive Producer Casey Ballard about the 2018 season and just a bit about her background in theatre.
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It’s a quiet, early morning in October. The approaching fall has brought a chill, and a mist hangs in the air. But something’s afoot in these peaceful surroundings. From the distance comes a groan—a shriek—the sound of shuffling feet—giggles. Wait, what? Giggles?
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It is almost time for another season of the Woodward Shakespeare Festival in Fresno, so we took some time to sit down with their executive producer Greg Taber to chat about the new season.
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Another summer of the Woodward Shakespeare Festival begins June 16 in Fresno so we took some time to chat with their executive producer for the past 5 years, Greg Taber, about the 2016 season.
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Can you imagine seeing all of William Shakespeare’s 37 plays in one night…in less than two hours? The Woodward Shakespeare Festival makes a fine go of it with its final production of the festival’s 11th season, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (Revised), which was developed by Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield in 1987. The Revised part updated some of the jokes to bring the humor into the 21st century.
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The Two Gentlemen of Verona isn’t the biggest and flashiest Shakespeare play, but it’s probably one of his first. The training wheels were still on, and he was learning to use some of the plot devices he would master in later plays. It’s a simple story, one you might see on a TV sitcom, and the Woodward Shakespeare Festival has given a bright, peppy, 50s look wrapped up in early rock-and-roll tunes that hearkens back to reruns of Happy Days.
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Kayla Weber’s set on The Festival Stage in Woodward Park looks like the metaphorical attic of the Woodward Shakespeare Festival, littered with bits and pieces of past productions: toppled columns from Julius Caesar, plywood trees, chunks of Macbeth, ironwork from A Streetcar Named Desire. The black set is embellished with rows of gold-stenciled designs, and a red band of paint next to the stage floor looks like dried blood that has seeped from behind the scenery. This is the world of the Greg Taber and Broderic Beard directed production of Richard III the WSF is presenting through July 11.
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The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last major plays, and one of my favorites (I have some vague childhood memories of the 1960 TV version with Maurice Evans, Richard Burton, Lee Remick, Roddy McDowall, and Tom Poston—my first introduction to the works of William Shakespeare). This is the final production of the Woodward Shakespeare Festival’s tenth season.
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Introducing one of the most fascinating Shakespeare characters you’ve probably never heard of–Christopher Sly. He’s a scoundrel, a drunk and dominates the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew, but he doesn’t appear in most productions (You won’t find him in the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor film version or the musical Kiss Me, Kate, which is built on the play). Well, the Woodward Shakespeare Festival production isn’t like most productions. Christopher Sly is back!
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It comes across a black expanse fissured with jagged cracks of blood red, peopled with refugees from a Halloween Haunt and a martial arts studio. It is a violent, unsettling version of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the first play in the Woodward Shakespeare Festival’s tenth season in Fresno’s Woodward Park.
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Every summer since KRL began we have written about and supported the Woodward Shakespeare Festival. This fall we had the chance to chat with Greg Taber, the executive director of WSF, about their off season events. We also got a preview of next summer’s season!
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A teacher on trial for teaching evolution in the classroom. In this era of creationism/evolution controversies, it sounds improbable, but possible…but it did happen…in the 1920s. In 1955, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee turned the story of the Scopes Monkey Trial into a play, Inherit the Wind, which is the Woodward Shakespeare Festival’s 20th-century play for the 2013 season, playing through August 10, sandwiched between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Julius Caesar. It’s a gently grayed look at the past, and a warning against thought control.
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Matilda is a friendly, feisty furry ninja who loves to play and who is brimming with energy and personality who is 1 year old! She was found at the intersection of a busy road and the freeway and was scooped up by a Good Samaritan! She greets you with cute little meows and she loves to cuddle once she’d finished playing. She’s been fostered with other cats and she like to be the center of attention. Matilda is available from the Cat House on the Kings.
