I just returned from a fabulous weekend of entertainment at the 36th annual Texas Shakespeare Festival in Kilgore, Texas. Kilgore has a population of 14,820. How does a small town earn a national reputation for creating one of the best Shakespeare festivals the country? The answer is one man — Raymond Caldwell. According to the TSF 36th season booklet, in 1984 he floated the idea to establish a professional summer theater for East Texas based in Kilgore that would employ high-caliber actors, technicians, designers and directors from throughout the nation. The inaugural season in 1986 had performances of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” along with the premiere of an original play “The Daisy Bradford 3.” According to Wikipedia, small-town Kilgore's fortunes changed dramatically on October 3, 1930, when wildcatter Columbus M. "Dad" Joiner struck oil with the well known as the Daisy Bradford #3.
According to the TSF booklet, after 35 seasons, the Texas Shakespeare Festival has staged 1,653 performances for more than 252,000 people. It has produced 29 plays of the Shakespeare cannon; 30 non-Shakespearean plays, both classic and modern; 37 productions for children — many of them original scripts written for the festival; two original scripts about the East Texas oilfield, “The Daisy Bradford 3” and “The Last Titan;” the world premiere of a musical “Revoco;” and 19 other musicals.
The TSF Guild was founded in 1994 to provide volunteer and financial support. I am proud to be a charter member of the TSF Guild which helps provide meals for the cast and crew and has purchased necessary technical equipment including the automated ticket system.
Because top-notch people from all over America plus some foreign countries live on the Kilgore College campus in dormitories during the four-week season and are focused on their craft, the stellar productions achieve a high level of professionalism. TSF is the hidden gem in East Texas. Let’s learn more about it.
According to Wikipedia, the Texas Shakespeare Festival is a professional summer theatre housed in the Anne Dean Turk Fine Arts Center on the campus of Kilgore College in Kilgore, Texas. TSF presents four weeks of performances during late June and July of five productions in repertory: two plays by Shakespeare, a classic, a musical and a children's show.
History
Established in 1986, the Texas Shakespeare Festival began as Kilgore College's contribution to the Texas Sesquicentennial celebration. The brainchild of Raymond Caldwell — a faculty member within the theatre program at Kilgore College and subsequent artistic director of the festival — the first season of TSF consisted of two plays by Shakespeare and “The Daisy Bradford 3,” a regional work commissioned for the celebration telling the story of the East Texas oil boom by Gifford Wingate, all performed by a small company of professional actors. The overwhelming popularity and quality of the summer theatre experience for the people of East Texas catapulted what was to have been a one-time event into an organization that is celebrating its almost fourth decade of performances. More than 1,000 theatre artists have worked at TSF including such well-known personalities as Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under; Dexter); Danny Pino (Cold Case); Glenn Fleshler (Spring Awakening; Guys and Dolls); Rick Holmes (Spamalot); Andrew Samonsky (South Pacific; Tick, Tick... Boom!); Glenn Kessler (Creator, Producer, Director and Actor for Damages); and Keythe Farley (co-author, Bat Boy: The Musical).
One of the benefits of living in East Texas during TSF was that you could invite the cast/crew to your home for dinner on the one night during the week when they were not working. I was blessed to have TSF company members in my home for dinner several times. My mother and father drove to Longview to attend the theatre and dinner at my home. You never knew which members of the cast/crew would show up at your door. The company manager would choose which company members participated. One time we had just seen the musical “Camelot” the night before when I saw the actors who played King Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot walking down my sidewalk. My mother shouted, “Oh my! It IS Lancelot!!! Quick, how can I look like I’m 22?” Michael C. Hall was playing Lancelot.
A couple of times I had murder mystery dinner parties where the guests would receive descriptions of their characters ahead of time. The invitees at one such party turned out to be the entire costume department, so they arrived fully dressed in fantastic costumes of their characters — a chef, a chauffeur, etc. It was SO much fun!
Productions
According to Wikipedia, in more than 20 years, the Texas Shakespeare Festival has produced 29 plays of Shakespeare's canon, as well as multiple American and European classics, original works, numerous musicals and very successful shows for young audiences. Its work with young audiences led to it being awarded a grant in 2005 to further support youth activities. The festival continues to audition and employ professional directors, actors, designers and technicians, as well as giving many university students from all across America their first summer theatre experience. The festival has attracted a range of attention throughout its more than three decades of performances. In 1999 a production of "Angels in America" produced by the Kilgore College Theatre Department and directed by Caldwell, led to death threats, anti-gay protests and a withdrawal of more than $50,000 in funding by the Gregg County Commissioners. Subsequently, however, the festival received grants from both Paul Newman's Own PEN Center, Dramatists Guild of America and other sympathetic sources nationwide.
I attended that production of “Angels in America” and saw the protestors outside the theatre. I was accosted by one of them trying to provide me with anti-gay pamphlets. The audience had to go through a metal detector to go into the theatre.
Support
Kilgore College provides the majority of the funding for the Festival, and provides a range of other support for the festival including: rehearsal facilities, office spaces, the Van Cliburn Auditorium, dormitory housing and meals for the entire company, scholarships for the apprentices, printing, publicity and public relations. Additional grants and foundations enable the Texas Shakespeare Festival to continue as a strong and vital cultural asset and tourist attraction for all of East Texas. The festival is also credited as bringing a degree of sophistication in the arts world to East Texas. In return, the festival supports the college with grant funding to help refurbish the auditorium in which it performs.
According to the 36th season TSF booklet, the festival has been awarded grants from the Texas Shakespeare Festival Foundation, Texas Shakespeare Festival Guild, Rosa May Griffin Foundation of Kilgore, Meadows Foundation, JS and SK Family Living Trust, National Endowment for the Arts, American Express, Cargill Foundation of Longview, Perkins Family Foundation, Phillips Petroleum Co., GTE Southwest, Texas Commission on the Arts, Texas Eastman Co., Dramatists Guild of America, T.L.L. Temple Foundation, City of Longview, City of Kilgore and a number of generous East Texas patrons whose philanthropy provides encouragement and high hopes for the future of the Texas Shakespeare Festival as a strong and vital cultural asset for all of East Texas.
Shakespeare’s comedies
Since I first started attending Texas Shakespeare Festival plays and musicals in 1986, I have seen 13 of Shakespeare’s comedies — All’s Well That Ends Well, Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, Love’s Labors Lost, Measure for Measure, Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Winter’s Tale.
This year one of the offerings was “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” According to Wikipedia, “The Merry Wives of Windsor” or “Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor” is a comedy by William Shakespeare first published in 1602, though believed to have been written in or before 1597. The Windsor of the play's title is a reference to the town of Windsor, also the location of Windsor Castle, in Berkshire, England. Though nominally set in the reign of Henry IV or early in the reign of Henry V, the play makes no pretense to exist outside contemporary Elizabethan era English middle class life. It features the character Sir John Falstaff, the fat knight who had previously been featured in “Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2.” It has been adapted for the opera at least ten times. The play is one of Shakespeare's lesser regarded works among literary critics. Tradition has it that “The Merry Wives of Windsor” was written at the request of Queen Elizabeth I. After watching “Henry IV Part I,” she asked Shakespeare to write a play showing Falstaff in love.
Shakespeare’s tragedies
Since I first started attending Texas Shakespeare Festival plays and musicals in 1986, I have seen 10 of Shakespeare’s tragedies — Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet.
This year the tragedy was “Romeo and Juliet.” According to Wikipedia, it is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about two young Italian star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with “Hamlet,” is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.
“Romeo and Juliet” belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity. The plot is based on an Italian tale translated into verse as “The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet” by Arthur Brooke in 1562 and retold in prose in “Palace of Pleasure” by William Painter in 1567. Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both but expanded the plot by developing a number of supporting characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris. Believed to have been written between 1591 and 1595, the play was first published in a quarto version in 1597. The text of the first quarto version was of poor quality, however, and later editions corrected the text to conform more closely with Shakespeare's original.
Shakespeare's use of his poetic dramatic structure — especially effects such as switching between comedy and tragedy to heighten tension, his expansion of minor characters and his use of subplots to embellish the story — has been praised as an early sign of his dramatic skill. The play ascribes different poetic forms to different characters, sometimes changing the form as the character develops. Romeo, for example, grows more adept at the sonnet over the course of the play.
“The Bridges of Madison County” was the musical this year. According to Wikipedia, “The Bridges of Madison County” is a musical, based on Robert James Waller's 1992 novel, with a book by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown. The musical premiered on Broadway at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on February 20, 2014, and closed on May 18, 2014. The Broadway production was directed by Bartlett Sher and starred Kelli O'Hara as Francesca and Steven Pasquale as Robert. Brown's work on the musical won the 2014 Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations after the Broadway production had already closed.
“The Book of Will” was the additional play this year. According to Chris Jones Nov. 21, 2017 article “They saved Shakespeare: ‘The Book of Will’ is a dramatic story well told” in the Chicago Tribune, in the early 1620s, a couple of aging actors named Henry Condell and John Heminges set about the task of publishing in a single, bound volume all of the plays of their late and beloved pal William Shakespeare. “Just to have them all together,” their characters say in Lauren Gunderson’s terrific play about their escapade. “So we know they’re safe.”
Condell and Heminges had a hard time. Various stolen and bowdlerized versions of such masterpieces as “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet” were already knocking around. Yet other great dramas, such as “Antony and Cleopatra” and “As You Like It,” lacking quarto editions, had to be pieced together from prompt scripts, actors’ sides and unauthorized copies notated in the twilight by sycophantic but possibly inaccurate copyists. And they needed a press with a huge capacity.
So they held their noses and went to the notorious William Jaggard, the Amazon.com of his day.
Had they not done so? Dollars to doughnuts, you’d know neither Romeo nor Juliet, most of the Brits in Hollywood would never have had careers — J.K. Rowling would have been right up the creek — and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater would be an outdoor patio for the Billy Goat Tavern.
Texas Shakespeare Garden
A garden filled with flowers, shrubs, herbs and trees mentioned in William Shakespeare’s plays is located just north of the Anne Dean Turk Fine Arts Center on the Kilgore College Campus. Kilgore Improvement and Beautification Association member Nelda Lewis provided the original inspiration for the garden. Ms. Lewis researched the project for two years, making sure it is as authentic as possible, and she also gave the first donation to the project. The Kilgore Improvement and Beautification Association has donated the garden to Kilgore College and dedicated it to former Texas Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Raymond Caldwell.
Bard & Breakfast Workshop
This summer workshop is offered to teachers. They get to go behind the scenes with the Texas Shakespeare Festival and engage in a variety of hands-on exercises, discussions, Q&A panels and demonstrations to create a well-rounded approach to teaching the fine arts. This workshop is designed and taught by professional actors, directors, artisans and technicians from all over the nation.
High School Student Acting Workshop
High school students get to immerse themselves in the life of a professional actor as they live and train among the Texas Shakespeare Festival Company during this six-day intensive workshop. It is designed for students who are serious about taking their work to the next level and seeing what life as a professional actor is really like. The workshop culminates in a showcase performance which is free to family and friends.
Yay!! So glad you had such an awesome time, sissy! Love the Texas Shakespeare Festival!!