CEDAR CITY — Today, the Utah Shakespeare Festival is internationally known, boasts a prestigious Tony Award as America’s Outstanding Regional Theater and is attended by over one hundred thousand each season.
But there was a day that glamour was little more than a dream in the fertile imagination of a 30-year-old junior faculty member at the College of Southern Utah, now known as Southern Utah University.
And more than a few people at the time thought Fred Adam’s dream of a world-class Shakespeare festival was audacious, if not delusional.
Over the years, some of both America’s and England’s finest actors have performed in Southern Utah. But in the summer of 1964, the second year of the festival’s existence, the cast consisted mostly of college students and a few high school kids, including me and my sister, Sharon.
Instead of today’s 16-week, $8 million productions, in those days shows ran for four weeks to an audience of a few thousand people, with everyone happy if the production broke even at the end.
Fred Adams produced the plays, his wife Barbara Gaddie produced the crowd favorite Greenshow. Together, they had come up with the idea for a Shakespeare festival at the Fluffy Bundle Laundromat just three years earlier. Local volunteers helped the staff and actors build the set and props, make costumes and pretty much everything else that needed to be done.
The stage was a modest affair with a small, roofless balcony. The audience sat on folding chairs. In the event of rain, everyone decanted to the indoor auditorium next door.
The playbill that summer consisted of “Macbeth,” “Twelfth Night,” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Fred directed Midsummer and a young professor from the University of California at Santa Barbara, Thomas Marcus, directed Twelfth Night and Macbeth, in which he cast himself in the title role.
They drafted students from their respective schools for most of the lead roles. Around those sturdy thespian pillars, they grouted out the minor roles with less-promising college kids and high schoolers. None of us got paid, but all of us had a very interesting summer. Local matrons and city fathers at the time had their doubts about the long-haired outsiders, but took comfort from the presence of young people they knew on stage.
Sharon was a straight-A student and well acquainted with Shakespeare. Me, not so much. She encouraged me to try out, so I did it on a lark, hoping to meet some new girls in the process. Fred Adams cast Sharon as an Amazonian bodyguard to Queen Hippolyta and me as Snug the Joiner in Midsummer.
My sister wore armor made of brown Naugahyde and I was outfitted in a lion costume of faux fur that was too short for my 6’8” frame. Tom Marcus cast Sharon as a page to Oliva’s court and me as spear-carrying bodyguard to Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night. It seemed an auspicious beginning to budding acting careers, or so we thought.
Mind you, most of the local kids had summer jobs and fit the rehearsals and performances in between their paying jobs. Sharon got up early to clean rooms and make beds at the Cedar Crest Motel. I mowed lawns, mended fences on the winter range and shoveled manure from the barnyard before we appeared each evening beneath the tall pines near Old Main, to be transformed into Shakespearean actors.
Likewise, locals with a love of music and the arts were recruited to perform in the Greenshow; singing madrigals, playing recorders, dancing and serving as puppeteers for the Punch and Judy show.
Sharon already knew and loved Shakespeare, and after listening to everyone’s lines night after night, I grew to appreciate his genius too. But alas, I was bored while waiting for my brief appearances on stage and my budding career was clipped when I missed two rehearsal appearances as a bodyguard to Duke Orsino.
Sadly, I was distracted by the charms of a girlfriend as we canoodled under the pines between calls, and Tom Marcus summarily dismissed me from the cast. But I still had my lines in “Bottom’s Dream,” the rustics’ play-within-a-play in Midsummer.
Other cast members were more discrete — and aware of the clock — including a pretty redhead from Santa Barbara who played the Fairy Queen Titania, who spent much of her down time becoming better acquainted with various members of the cast on the couch in the library lounge.
Her counterpart who played Oberon, King of the Shadows, was also from Santa Barbara and let the role go to his head, insisting that others on the cast, particularly those of us in minor roles, give him a wide berth and be careful not step on his cape.
Sharon and I were introduced that summer not only to the timeless verse of Shakespeare, but also to the petty gossip, jealousies, and vanities that find fertile soil in the cast of summer stock theater. Not to say we did not join in, but it was an education nonetheless.
We also learned not to say “Macbeth” in the theater, since we were not in the play, as it would bring bad luck to the performance. We had to refer to it as “the Scottish play” instead. Apparently, as superstition has it, if you do say “Macbeth” you have to leave the area, spin around three times, spit, curse, then seek permission to come back in to avoid theatrical disaster.
Fred Adams’ energy and imagination were something to behold. He was a force of nature and brought out the best in those around him. He had a wicked sense of humor, including the time that summer he convinced Bernett Baldwin, who played Francis Flute, to enhance his bust line with balloons for his role of Thisbe.
Having done so, when they stab Pyramus’ dagger in the heart, one of the balloons pops. It never failed to bring peals of laughter from the audience. In his defense of the ruse, Fred told us “Oh, good grief! Shakespeare would have used pigs’ bladders.”
Paul Vorkink, a professor at CSU, played the role of the voluble Nick Bottom, who in turn plays Pyramus, whom Puck turns into a donkey, whom the Fairy Queen falls madly in love with only to discover too late that he was not what she thought he was. (Don’t ask, just see the play). His performance of the death scene with Thisbe was a crowd favorite, as was Walter Price’s performance as a stubby-horned, fur-clad Puck.
The small audience for those early performances were mostly local folks, with a sprinkling of tourists. Friends and family of cast members, including mine and Sharon’s, showed up to enjoy the plays, enthusiastically applauding their kin. And the audiences were uniformly appreciative, often giving us unwarranted standing ovations. Very few of those who performed in the Festival went on to careers in theater.
Most went back to, or on to, jobs in teaching, business, or other mundane professions. But, no doubt, none of us ever forgot those magical times. I had the good fortune as a college student to study Shakespeare in Fred Adam’s classes, and later to serve for a time on the festival board. Like so many others whom he inspired to appreciate the bard, I credit Fred Adams for my love of Shakespeare.
The professionalism and success of the Utah Shakespeare Festival is a lasting tribute to the imagination and determination of Fred Adams, and to those he gathered around him. No one in those early days, with the exception of Fred himself, would have dared to imagine the heights to which the current festival has ascended. It is a good reminder for us all to pursue our dreams, because even a most rare vision can become reality.
Photo Gallery
The Utah Shakespeare Festival theater in 1964 was a modest affair with the balcony lacking a roof and the audience seated in folding chairs in Cedar City, Utah, date unspecified | Photo courtesy Utah Shakespeare Festival, St. George News Fred & Barbara Adams with their toy poodle in the Hall of Trees in the foyer of the CSU auditorium in the early 1960s, Cedar City, Utah | Photo courtesy Southern Utah University, St. George News Cast members in the production of Twelfth Night in the summer in Cedar City, Utah, circa 1964 | Photo courtesy Utah Shakespeare Festival, St. George News Titania, Queen of the Fairies, and Oberon, King of the Shadows, with their entourage in the 1964 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Cedar City, Utah | Photo courtesy Utah Shakespeare Festival, St. George News Puck and Titania in the 1964 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Cedar CIty, Utah | Photo courtesy Utah Shakespeare Festival, St. George News The full cast of the 1964 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Cedar CIty, Utah | Photo courtesy Utah Shakespeare Festival, St. George News The playbill for the 1964 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Cedar CIty, Utah | Photo courtesy Utah Shakespeare Festival, St. George News Fred Esplin and Fred Adams in the summer of 2018, Cedar City, Utah | Photo courtesy Fred Esplin, St. George News
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