Shakespeare in Santa Cruz: Performance Histories

(1980, 1982, 1991) 

A Midsummer Night's Dream, occupies a special place in Santa Cruz’s long history with Shakespeare. In the spring of 1980, Audrey Stanley, a professor of theater arts who would become the founding director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz Shakespeare, put on a production of Dream with  a cast of student actors and members of the community. It was performed in a small, natural amphitheater behind Kerr Hall with a backdrop of the redwoods, and although the audience baked in the sun, it was a success. The production toured Santa Cruz County and other California universities, its open-air format allowing the troupe to perform in places without theater buildings,. After the death of Cesare Lombardi “Joe” Barber, a literature professor and staunch advocate for the creation of an annual Shakespeare festival in Santa Cruz, sociology professor Dane Archer organized a meeting between Chancellor Sinsheimer and local leaders to discuss the creation of the festival. Two summers later, the festival began with  A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear. In Stanley’s view, these plays are supreme examples of Shakespeare’s comedy and tragedy. 

While the California redwood trees may not resemble the Athenian or English woods the Bard was imagining, the backdrop brings Shakespeare’s writing into the physical setting seamlessly. The redwoods create an air of magic and mysticism, which is exactly what Shakespeare intended to evoke. The forest is where inhibitions are lost and where the lovers learn their true natures. Under the towering trees, the audience is not forced to imagine the setting, they are just as much a part of it as the characters. The 1982 production began in Athens, in front of the UCSC Performing Arts Center. The Athenians, clad in 1890s Coney Island apparel, quarrel about their fraught love lives. The lovers elope and the audience is told to “follow the lovers into the woods” as they are led into the Forest Glen for the first time. Co-directors Bonnie Showers and George Kovach claimed to have stumbled upon the Glen and began rehearsing there. According to the festival designer Norvid Roos, the Glen was “raw, baroquely primitive and somewhat overpowering,” the perfect setting for a play in which all inhibitions and societal norms crumble as the characters and audience are exposed to the true nature of desire in the sun-dappled Glen.   

Tony Church and Julian Curry, both members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, drew audiences over the hill for Stanley’s production of King Lear. The comedic Dream provided the audience with the necessary levity, with a largely local and student cast. UCSC graduate Jennifer Kaiser wrote to Stanley, asking to audition for Dream. She played Helena in Stanley’s 1980 production and after a year spent in theater school in London, she returned to play Titania. The festival was accompanied by a Renaissance food fair picnic and an effort to incorporate Shakespearean aesthetics into the beach town, through the “Bardwalk”, the “Bardwagon”, and a renaissance pageant at the mall. The Bard himself rode the Giant Dipper on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk to excite children and tourists about the festival. Reviews acknowledged the immaturity of the cast, but they were all completely mesmerized by the setting of the play. The festival was a success. 

Shakespeare Santa Cruz performed Dream for the second time in 1991, this time under the direction of Danny Scheie, who cast Stanley as Puck in a Peter Pan outfit. Audiences saw the beloved Stanley sore from tree to tree and the comedic fairies lifted up and down using an elaborate and somewhat primitive system of levers and pulleys. Scheie dressed Theseus (Michael Rogers) in a parody of modern military uniforms, while Hippolyta (Megan Cole) appeared “as a vanquished prisoner of war from a non-Western, non-patriarchal culture,” wearing a viking helmet, braids, and elaborate jewelry. 

Costumes for the lovers and Egeus located the play in the United States of the 1950s. Once the lovers enter the woods, they strip off their clothes and the 1950s setting falls away. In their undergarments, the characters transform into unique individuals, outside of societal and parental pressures. Scheie’s decision reflects the idea that adolescents realize themselves through their sexuality- a controversial idea for Shakespeare’s time. This moment in the woods evokes the same kind of equalizing and depersonalizing quality that is present in the Rocky Horror Picture Show when the couple’s clothes are taken from them. 

The echoes of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in this version of the Dream pointed to  anarchic sexual politics in Shakespeare’s comedy. Scheie double cast Theseus with Titania and Hippolyta with Oberon. Michael Rogers’ drag Titania was attended by a retinue of burly men in tutus and fairy wings, a decision that drew mixed reviews from critics. Scheie argued that racial and gender cross-casting established an other-worldliness in the woods that was true to Shakespeare’s vision of the forest, where social, biological, and physical rules don’t apply. From Scheie’s perspective, much of Dream concerns the suppression of the feminine and the masculine within both sexes. For female characters, masculinity expresses a desire for autonomy within the patriarchal order of Athens- or 1950s America-, while for male characters, feminine or queer aspects of the self must be repressed in order to assert control over others. 

 (1987- 2012)

Shakespeare Santa Cruz first made its musical debut in 1987 with a production of Company, Stephen Sondheim’s now iconic musical about a bachelor’s reflections on the relationships of his best friends - all of whom are married couples. At the time, the SSC was beginning to make a name for itself in the Bay Area by staging Shakespeare’s plays in modern settings, and adding a musical to its already popular summer festival was seen by many as a big step. This production was the directorial debut of the legendary Mark Rucker, who partnered with music director Phillip Collins with great success. Performances from the likes of Tim Bowman, Nancy Carlin, Kathy Nitz, John Zerbe, and Michael Wright received rave reviews, and the successful production paved the way for the company’s next musical production of Damn Yankees in 1993.

Dannie Scheie was inspired to include Damn Yankees in his inaugural season as Artistic Director because of the parallels he drew between how Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience had made a habit of going to the theatre and how Americans had made a pastime of going to see baseball games. Damn Yankees played in repertory with All’s Well That Ends Well and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (another play about selling one’s soul to the devil). Rucker returned to SSC to direct the musical, which featured musical direction from Nicole Paiement, and performances by Susan Brecht, Kate Hawley, Paul Whitworth, and Julie James. 

SSC did not produce another musical until 1997, when Artistic Director Paul Whitworth approached the board of the UCSC theatre department to see about expanding the festival’s current offerings to include a holiday show. Whitworth adapted Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), as he felt that “The adventures of Toad, Rat, Mole, Otter and Badger touch a chord in us all… because they put us in touch with our deepest instincts about what is important in life: about friends and family, about home, about who we really are and what we really want. These discoveries are the true gifts of the holiday season and where better to celebrate them than in the theater?” The Wind in the Willows, featuring the set-designing talents of Joe Weiss, costumes by B. Modern, and musical composition by Gregg Coffin, opened on December 5th and was an immediate success with its audience. After a sold-out revival the following year, Whitworth enlisted the help of playwright and actress Kate Hawley to create a pantomime for Californian audiences in 1999.

In Hawley’s words: “Pantos” … [are] a familiar fairy tale and filled with romance, songs, dances, anarchic humor, and audience participation… [and] are often an English child’s first theatrical experience. If they are good, they create a taste for live theatre that lasts a lifetime.” Hawley and Whitworth settled on Cinderella, as the first fairy tale they would adapt. With a script by Hawley and score by frequent collaborator Gregg Coffin, Cinderella featured the talents of both SSC actors (like Mike Ryan) and acting students in UCSC’s theatre department, and was designed by Dipu Gupta (sets), B. Modern (costumes), and Terry J. Barto (choreography). Joseph Ribeiro played the production’s dame, Mrs. Badden-Rotten. Audiences were enchanted by the musical’s dancing, Fosse-inspired sheep, allusions to Shakespeare, and the encouragement of audience participation, and an SSC tradition was born!

Cinderella was revived the following year, and the audience’s enthusiasm inspired Hawley to collaborate with Craig Bohmler to write and score a new panto, Gretel & Hansel, in 2001. Ribeiro returned to originate the role of Carmen Monoxide, the glamorous, wicked witch who opposed Gretel, Hansel, and their team of dancing Glamour Pusses (lead by a returning Mike Ryan in the role of Tom). Gretel & Hansel sold out weeks before it opened and became one of the most successful SSC shows of all time. Following a Gretel & Hansel revival in 2002, Hawley teamed up with composer Adam Wernick to create The Princess and the Pea in 2004. Another audience favorite, The Princess and the Pea paid homage to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night by making the Princess dress as a boy when she first arrives at court, as well as an identical twin lost at sea, and Joseph Ribeiro in the role of the ambitious advisor, Ratatouille. Last in the line of successful pantos, Sleeping Beauty premiered in 2006, as a part of the company’s 25th season. 

SSC attempted to revive its popular holiday programming  in 2011 by teaming up with UCSC’s Theatre Arts department to stage the Tony-nominated musical A Year with Frog and Toad. This show was directed by Art Manke and featured American Conservatory Theatre's Nick Gabriel opposite Mike Ryan as the titular Frog and Toad. Manke favored a Victorian steam-punk aesthetic for his production, with designer B. Modern costuming Frog and Toad in newsboy caps and goggles. The following year, SSC Alum Nancy Carlin returned to direct Honk! The Musical for the company’s annual holiday show. This musical adapts the familiar story of the ugly duckling (played by Michael Becker) into a tale about a duck that falls into the trap of a foie-gras craving cat, who learns to love himself on his journey back home.

(1996)

There are many challenges that theatre companies must face in staging a production of Pericles. Some feel that the play, written as a collaboration between William Shakespeare and George Wilkins, lacks cohesion between its different scenes. Others feel that the greatest challenge is addressing the many locations in which the play is set. The director must decide how to best transport the audience alongside Pericles on his journey across the Mediterranean, without detracting from the more heartfelt themes about family and honor that form the play’s core.

Pericles was produced only once before in Shakespeare Santa Cruz’s history, when it was staged in repertory with Twelfth Night and Moliere’s Tartuffe for the 1996 season. United under the theme of ‘renewal,’ then-Artistic Director Paul Whitworth felt these three plays addressed people who “at the end of a century… [felt] isolated and disenfranchised while the search for meaning and for community [became] ever more urgent.” Under the direction of Christopher Grabowski, this production sought to overcome the play’s production difficulties by transporting the audience to a colorful, Disney-cartoonish Mediterranean world, in which Gower (played by Ken Grantham) framed Pericles’ travels as an epic fairytale across distant lands that resembled those the audience would be more likely to recognize, like Thailand, India, and Iran. In an attempt to create a throughline between the play’s contrastive scenes, composer Robert Maggio and music director Greg Coffin set many of the play’s soliloquies to music inspired by countries around the Mediterranean.

The production received mixed reviews from critics. Publications like MetroActive Stage and Good Times Santa Cruz praised the actors’ performances, making particular note of performances from Grantham, Wilson D. Michaels as Pericles, and Jack Zerbe and June A. Lomena as King Cleon and Queen Dionyza, respectively. However, critics felt less warm about the way the production handled the play’s darker themes, and mentioned that its musical, storybook-like approach felt at odds with its storylines about incest, murder, and prostitution.

(2001, 2014, 2016)

In 2001, the festival’s twentieth anniversary, Tim Ocel’s production of Dream appeared opposite Macbeth and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer and foregrounded the theme of “strange intelligence.” According to Paul Whitworth, then Artistic Director, “These plays all take place at night when the submerged side of human activity is made manifest.” For Dream, that meant “dig[ging] into the carnal and sacred sides of love, portraying a struggle between the constructed world of society, order and rank and the magical wilderness of instinct and sexuality.” Dipu Gupta’s set design was a focal point for that investigation and proved as capable of undergoing radical change as any of the characters in the play. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the “imposing set for the opening royal court and town scenes -- high, thick, distressed green walls with peeling gilt cornice and trim -- g[ave] way to the fairy-infested forest in an astonishing coup de theatre that makes wondrous use of the redwoods surrounding the stage.” As the barrier between inside and outside collapsed, the Victorian uniforms and gowns of the Athenian court gave way to punk-rock finery in which B. Modern dressed the faeries. At the same time, the lovers – played by Maria Dizzia (Hermia), Daniel Passer (Lysander), fan-favorite Kate MacNichol (Helena), and the festival’s own Mike Ryan (Demetrius) – woke into the strange intelligence of sexual maturity, in which they encountered themselves and each other, for the first time, as mysteries. Critics praised Tommy Gomez’s Bottom for “anchor[ing] scenes with a tempered bumptiousness and sly humor” and for the rapport between Bottom and Titania, played by Mhari Sandoval, whose performance as the spell-besotted fairy queen was “pack[ed] with dynamic strength and biker-hippie resilience.”

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Richard E. White’s production of Dream in 2009 addressed an uncertain future for Shakespeare Santa Cruz, the country, and the planet. White explored what it is like for modern people to live in a precarious relationship to the natural world, from which they are alienated by technology but which nevertheless checks and challenges their fantasies of control. The San Francisco Chronicle called this fourth staging of the play at the festival  “a Midsummer for the climate-change era.” White called the forest “a place that grows adults back down to the very basic desires, the emotional volatility, the lack of a filter, of children,” as against the play’s other, urban setting, which one critic described as “an updated Athens, complete with fashion vixens and victims, cell phone interruptions, GPS directions, and a duke who jogs with his secret servicemen.” The prestige labels worn by Hermia (Lenne Klingaman) and Demetrius (Evans Eden Jarnefeldt), played as children of wealthy elites, contrasted with the casual, everyday clothes worn by Lysander (Miles Villanuera) and Helena (Emily Kitchens), the children of families from a lower class. But in the forest, these differences in status gave way to feral passions that are the common lot of all lovers: we are all the same when we are in love. Michael Ganio’s spare and unobtrusive set echoed this idea. Its mere scaffolding of the space in the Glen showed that, in the woods, all barriers amount to nothing. The entire cast of this production earned acclaim, but according Good Times, its “virtuoso turn” was Scott Wentworth's Bottom, who “unleashed an array of pitches, accents and inflections that left the audience almost too dazzled to breathe” – but also breathed new life into the festival which was weathering financial storms and facing an uncertain future.

In 2016, commemorating its first year in the Grove, Santa Cruz Shakespeare returned to the play with which the festival began thirty-four years earlier. Good Times praised “the sheer cleverness of this minimalist production,” while Terri McMahon, the director, celebrated the play as “delicious interwoven strands that make up the tapestry of a rich and complex comedy” and “invites you to share it wherever you are” in life. Critics applauded McMahon’s Dream as “strong, amusing, and seamless production” and noted its “incredibly effective use of metatheatre.” The Santa Cruz Sentinel summed up the warm response the production received throughout the summer. “What a superb beginning to what will likely be a very long stay for Santa Cruz’s determined little Shakespeare devotees who, against all odds, built a highly habitable visitor-friendly outdoor theater in the woods in a mere four months.” Who could have dreamt it?