A Partial Season at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival

Although the Colorado Shakespeare Festival listed three Shakespearean plays for its 2023 season— Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale—the weekend I visited I was able to see only two of the three, Much Ado and King Lear. The morning before the scheduled afternoon performance of Winter’s Tale, my colleague Michael P. Jensen received a text saying that the performance was cancelled due to a “virus” that had affected the cast. The company insisted that this was not COVID, but the unfortunate result was that we were not able to see the full complement of the primary season: a middle comedy, a major tragedy, and a romance. More’s the pity, as Much Ado and Lear featured some excellent individual acting and creative staging that made one want to see more of the company’s artistic talent.

Both plays were staged in the Mary Rippon outdoor theatre that resembles a miniature version of the classical Greek theatre at Epidaurus. Twenty-six concentric rows of raked seats rise gradually above the slightly elevated round stage, allowing, as in the Greek theatre, excellent views for all spectators. For Much Ado, the stage was festooned to simulate a lavishly decorated French country house in the early 1920s just after the end of WW I. In her production note, dramaturg Amanda Giguere noted that several avant-garde art movements dominated French intellectual life in this period, and the production captured this sense of social and artistic renewal after the horrors of the war. Numerous vines…