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CEDAR CITY — A big celebration got underway Thursday night in Cedar City as the Utah Shakespearean Festival marked its 50th anniversary. Many are expressing excitement as they look forward to this season and share memories of years past.
Magical and mysterious: bringing the world of William Shakespeare to life. That was the vision of Southern Utah State College Professor Fred Adams and his then fiancee Barbara. They made their plans outside a Laundromat in the spring of 1961.
I would say, 'Oh give yourselves a chance. I mean (Shakespear's) been around 400 years, people have loved him for 400 years, why couldn't you?'
–Fred Adams, Utah Shakespearean Festival founder
"I had a legal-sized yellow pad and we started talking about what we'd really like to do," Fred Adams explained in a 1986 interview, "and as my class thesis I had designed a summer Shakespeare festival."
"I would say, 'Oh give yourselves a chance,'" Adams continued. "‘I mean he's been around 400 years, people have loved him for 400 years, why couldn't you?"
The Lions' Club donated funds, and the college president gave his support.
"I let him tell me about it," former SUSC president Royden Braithwaite said. "You know Fred is gifted with contagious enthusiasm as well as great talent."
Build it and they will come — actors, directors and designers came from across the country to work with Adams.
"He's had such a profound influence in my life, professionally, personally," said Daivid Ivers, one of the festival's new artistic directors. "He has taught me an immense amount about this career. But more than that, he's taught me about character."
Brian Vaughn, also an artistic director for the festival, said, "Fred Adams is an astonishing, wonderful human being. It takes a special person to have that vision, to have that inkling to go, 'I want to do this,' to know what those plays can do."
But the course of true love never did run smooth, as Shakespeare would say, and neither did the plays.
"We started to come when the strong winds would blow Fred's cardboard scenery across the street to the junior high school some nights, in the middle of the play," Braithewaite recalled.
The first theater, a copy of Shakespeare's Wooden O, drew the Royal Shakespeare Company and BBC in 1981. Another theater increased the festival's and Adams' reputations, which brought theater's highest honor: a Tony Award.
As the festival grew in size and popularity, state leaders participated. The Lord of the Feast banished Gov. Scott Matheson. Gov. Mike Leavitt saw his future wife, Jackie, on the festival stage.
"Jackie thought she was getting some sort of Shakespeare-experienced scholar," Leavitt said in a 2001 interview, "but I was there to see her and didn't know anything about Shakespeare."
Now 150,000 visitors make it a destination: Shakespeare and Cedar City.
"We all, as actors, when we come here during the summer, sit around after the shows and talk about the things that we love and the things that are so great about this place," said Melinda Pfundstein, with the Acting Company at the Utah Shakespearean Festival.
As for Adams, he is now 80-years-old. Though no longer the festival's executive director, he remains a force.
"He connects with the audiences because the audiences, to him, are family, they are friends. He's just putting on a show in his backyard," said R. Scott Phillips, current executive director of the Utah Shakespearean Festival
Thursday night Adams will direct the season opener: "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
Email: cmikita@ksl.com
