There is a story that Fred Adams, the late founder of the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, was fond of telling:
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In the early days of Latter-day Saint pioneers settling the West, when Brigham Young sent the first group to settle what would become Iron County, one of the first things that group did upon arriving was put on a production of “The Merchant of Venice.”
The idea that the love of William Shakespeare’s works already ran deep in that rural Utah community — and had since the beginning — was part of what drove Adams to create the festival. And, 65 years later, it seems that Adams’ belief in the community has borne out: Utah’s Shakespeare festival is one of the most widely respected in the country today.
It’s certainly true that the early Utah pioneers brought a love of theater (and Shakespeare) with them across the plains. To pay tribute to those early pioneers, Adams made sure to include “The Merchant of Venice” in the lineup of plays performed during the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s first season in 1962.
But Utah wasn’t alone in its love of Shakespeare — it was widespread across the early days of the rugged West. For everyone from mountain men to gold miners, the Bard’s plays were commonplace entertainment. As Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed during his travels through America in the 1830s, “There is scarcely a pioneer’s hut where one does not encounter some odd volumes of Shakespeare.”
And that love of Shakespeare continues today: Although Shakespeare festivals can be found across the country, they seem to have a particular hold in the West — from Ashland, Oregon, to Boulder, Colorado, to Boise, Idaho, and beyond.
“There is scarcely a pioneer’s hut where one does not encounter some odd volumes of Shakespeare.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”
So what was it that drew early Westerners to Shakespeare’s work? And why does the Bard still have such a hold on the West today?
How Shakespeare festivals got their start in the West
When Adams first began his plans to create a Shakespeare festival in Cedar City, he didn’t have to look far for inspiration. Although he did visit festivals in Stratford, Canada, and Connecticut, his biggest influence came from a festival in a rural Western town not entirely unlike Cedar City — the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.
The Oregon festival was already a long-running tradition by the time Adams paid it a visit in 1959. Founded in 1935 by Angus Bowmer, it remains the oldest, and largest, Shakespeare festival in the country today.
Bowmer and Adams developed a friendship, and Adams learned a lot from Bowmer, incorporating what he learned into his plans for the festival. Around this same time, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, now the second-oldest in the U.S., was founded in Boulder in 1958; one of its founders, James Sandoe, had previously worked at the Oregon festival and also brought along many familiar practices with him.
What are some of the common practices that these early festivals (and many, though not all, Shakespeare festivals today) had in common? One was a commitment to repertory theater, meaning performing multiple plays in constant rotation throughout the season instead of one play for a single stretch at a time.
They also include what’s known as a “greenshow” — a casual preshow performance that usually takes place on the lawn outside of the theater and includes music, skits or games. And, of course, an outdoor theater is also an important feature, to try to capture the experience of what it might have been like in Shakespeare’s own Globe Theatre.
Although there are now Shakespeare festivals all across the country, they are still plentiful in the West. In Boise, the Idaho Shakespeare Festival is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year; and it shares productions with the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, which has been running in various forms since the mid-1970s. More recently, Arizona’s Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival was founded in 2015, while the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival provides free “Shakespeare in the Park” performances throughout the Bay Area.
‘Amusement as well as religion’: Theater in early Utah
But the stage was set for Shakespeare in the West far earlier — in fact, from the very beginning of Western settlement.
“Right from the beginning, when it was the state of Deseret, Brigham Young was promoting quality theater (in Utah),” Adams told the Deseret News in 2014. “I think probably as important as any (reason for founding the festival) was to keep alive this passion that the early settlers had in the arts, in classical music, in classical literature and especially in the writings of William Shakespeare.”
Why Shakespeare in particular?
“Shakespeare helped tame the West,” Michael Bahr, executive director of the Utah Shakespeare Festival, told the Deseret News. “When people came across … there were certain fundamentals that we came with, and Shakespeare and theater was one of those things.”
Another “fundamental” for the early settlers would have been a different sort of book: the King James Version of the Bible. But, according to Bahr, their familiarity with the Bible likely would have helped their understanding of Shakespeare. King James I not only commissioned the translation of the Bible, but he was also a patron of Shakespeare. “Macbeth” was written in 1606 and is believed to have been written, in part, to appeal to King James’ Scottish heritage; the King James Version of the Bible followed in 1611. So, for settlers already reading regularly from the Bible, it wouldn’t have been a stretch to understand the language of the Bard from the same period.
Theater in general, though, was important to early Utahns, and to Brigham Young — Utah’s first governor and president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — in particular. “The people must have amusement as well as religion,” he once said.
“These saints are coming into the valley and they’re wanting to create a civilization in the middle of this, and good civilization needs the arts,” Bahr said. “So we’re going to sing, we’re going to dance, … we’re going to have an orchestra.”
So when the pioneers first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, one of the earliest structures they built was called the Bowery, in the block where Temple Square stands in Salt Lake City today. The Bowery was used for religious services but also had a stage that was used for plays.
Five years later, they built Salt Lake City’s Social Hall, which has been called the first playhouse built west of the Missouri River, and a bust of Shakespeare was placed above the stage to mark it out specifically as a theater.
“I think probably as important as any (reason for founding the festival) was to keep alive this passion that the early settlers had in the arts, in classical music, in classical literature and especially in the writings of William Shakespeare.”
— Fred Adams, founder of the Utah Shakespeare Festival, in 2014
Though Brigham Young talked about the importance of “amusement,” he also believed that theater could help lead to a more “virtuous” community, saying during the 1862 dedication of the new Salt Lake Theatre, “Upon the stage of a theater can be represented in character, evil and its consequences, good and its happy results and rewards; the weakness and the follies of man, the magnanimity of virtue and the greatness of truth.”
The Salt Lake Theatre, which replaced the Social Hall, ushered in a heyday of theater — both from within and outside the Utah community.
During an 1864 production of “Macbeth,” for example, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was brought in to sing the parts of the witches. And stars from across the country also performed on the Salt Lake Theatre stage, from Sarah Bernhardt to P.T. Barnum to “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Acclaimed playwright Oscar Wilde even gave a speech at the theater in 1882, though the Deseret News reviewer in attendance was not a fan.
“They reveled and cherished their theater and music,” Adams said of early Utahns.
Shakespeare in ‘the wilderness’: From mountain men to gold miners
But outside of Utah, Shakespeare’s influence was felt throughout the 19th century, too. And while on the East Coast and in the U.K., Shakespeare was increasingly seen as a more high-class form of entertainment, in the West, the Bard’s works remained popular with the masses.
“No other writer was so quickly assimilated into the wilderness,” said Shakespeare scholar Ashley Thorndike, according to The Guardian.
This popularity meant that Shakespeare appeared in some unlikely places. For example, mountain man and wilderness guide Jim Bridger, the first person of European descent to explore the area of the Great Salt Lake, was determined to read Shakespeare, even though he was illiterate. So he hired a boy to read Shakespeare to him, sometimes for hours at a time, and eventually could quote from his plays at length.
Shakespeare’s plays were also common entertainment in mining camps during the California Gold Rush, and the miners were “strikingly knowledgeable about Shakespeare,” UCLA professor Stephen Dickey told Folger Shakespeare Library.
What’s more, according to Folger, “It wasn’t unheard of for miners to correct actors’ lines, and an audience wouldn’t hesitate to ask an actor to perform a particular speech again if they really liked it.”
Interestingly — especially since the performances in the camps were often more wild and rambunctious than we’re used to today — the miners’ favorite Shakespeare plays were more often tragedies than comedies. In fact, “Richard III” was “far and away the most popular play in 19th-century American west,” per The Guardian.
Movies began to eclipse the popularity of live theater in the 20th century, but Shakespeare quickly became a mainstay in Hollywood, including in Westerns. Films like John Wayne’s “McLintock!”, Glenn Ford’s “Jubal” and Gregory Peck’s “Yellow Sky” were all adaptations of Shakespeare plays.
“In John Ford’s ‘My Darling Clementine,’ starring Henry Fonda, the itinerant Shakespearean actor Granville Thorndyke, played by Alan Mowbray, performs ‘To be or not to be’ to a bar full of desperadoes before grandly declaring that Shakespeare is not ‘meant for taverns or tavern louts,’ a line that sparks an inevitable gun fight,” according to The Guardian.
How Western towns helped shape Shakespeare festivals’ success
Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, owes its existence to the Gold Rush. Founded in 1855 along the California border, nearly 300 miles from Portland, the remote and rural town seems, at first glance, like an unlikely spot for the country’s first Shakespeare festival.
But Ashland later became a hub for another important influence: the Chautauqua movement, which brought traveling lecturers and performers to cities and towns all across the country. Rural towns in Utah and other Western states, including Cedar City, were also visited by Chautauqua groups, but Ashland constructed a building specifically for their performances in 1893 and became a hub of culture, attracting the likes of performers such as John Philip Sousa and William Jennings Bryan.
As the movement began to die out in the 1920s, the building was partially torn down, though its walls were left standing. Angus Bowmer observed similarities between the Chautauqua walls and Elizabethan theaters — and the idea for a Shakespeare festival was born.
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Bowmer proposed to the city hosting a festival with two plays during Ashland’s Fourth of July celebrations. The town agreed to loan him $400, though it was concerned about getting its money back — it suggested hosting boxing matches as well as the plays, to bring in more revenue. Bowmer agreed, because he said it was similar to the preshow attractions that might have gone on in Shakespeare’s time. As it turned out, though, the profit from the plays ended up covering the expenses of the boxing matches, and its success led to a second season that turned into an annual tradition.
Today, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is still going strong; despite several years of financial struggles starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, it saw significant growth last year — including a 42% increase in ticket sales from 2024.
Other Shakespeare festivals across the West have come from similarly humble beginnings to grow into success stories today. In the case of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Sara Bruner, artistic director of the festival, told the Deseret News she believes it’s “grown up” over the years alongside Boise as a city, noting that residents “take great pride” in the festival.
“Our first venue was just literally like a little grassy knoll in the middle of downtown,” Bruner said. “The full budget that first summer was $4,500. And now 50 years later, we have a state-of-the-art outdoor amphitheater that seats 800 people. … So what started out as this really bold idea has just really evolved along with Boise.”
The Utah festival has gone through a similar growing-up process. Adams took out a $1,000 loan from Cedar City’s local Lions Club to put on three plays for the first full season. By the end of the two-week season, however, they had already made a $2,000 profit, with over 3,000 visitors, setting the festival up for a second season the next year. Now, the festival has a Tony Award and over 100,000 visitors each year.
Why Shakespeare has stayed ‘evergreen’
Although Shakespeare’s plays were long seen as popular entertainment in the West, his works have been headed in another direction in more recent years.
For a variety of reasons, Shakespeare is sometimes viewed in popular culture as being more “high-brow” or difficult to understand. Where Shakespeare’s plays might once have been the main draw at a festival, they might now be unfamiliar or even intimidating to audiences.
But that’s also part of the reasons why Shakespeare festivals still exist.
“(Shakespeare’s) characters, their situations, remain evergreen to us because these are the complex issues of being alive: love, war, power, ambition, hope, loss, death, marriage. These things will be in our lives no matter what, and Shakespeare and the way that the stories are formulated are a safe way for us to examine ourselves and have a little bit of self-reflection.”
— Sara Bruner, artistic director of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival
The Utah Shakespeare Festival follows what Bahr calls “the Fred formula,” based on Adams’ preferred way of scheduling plays each season. Every year, they try to perform one of Shakespeare’s comedies, one tragedy, and one of his lesser-known works. For example, this year, the festival is performing “Twelfth Night” (a comedy), “Hamlet” (a tragedy) and “Troilus and Cressida,” which is rarely performed.
Performing the lesser-known plays helps to build “an appetite” for them, according to Bahr.
In fact, Bahr said that he encountered a patron, who visits the festival every year from outside the U.S., who saw “Troilus and Cressida” twice. When Bahr asked him why he was watching it the second time, the man replied, “Where else am I going to have a chance to see this show?”
Nearly all Shakespeare festivals, however — Utah included — have expanded to include non-Shakespeare plays in their lineup each year. Bahr and Bruner both called these other plays a “gateway” back into Shakespeare for audiences. Musicals, in particular, have been a major draw.
Musicals are “simpler and more straightforward,” but they’re also “an American art form,” Bruner said. “It’s ours, in a way.”
And Bahr believes there’s a connection between musicals and Shakespeare that festival performances especially are able to draw out — the idea of “direct address” to the audience. Many of Shakespeare’s characters perform monologues where they’re speaking directly to the audience, but musicals, he said, do the same thing.
“When we sing to you, we are literally monologuing,” Bahr said. “We are literally having a conversation with you.”
Part of what makes live theater special, according to Bruner, is having those moments of connection — both with the actors, “the people who have been really, really working hard on something just for you,” and with your fellow audience members.
“That communal sense is something that is integral to what we need as human beings,” she said. “And theater, live theater, is in the business of creating community every night.”
Beyond the importance of theater in general, though, there is something unique about Shakespeare that has made him important to audiences in the past and will continue to make him important to audiences in the future.
“(Shakespeare’s) characters, their situations, remain evergreen to us because these are the complex issues of being alive: love, war, power, ambition, hope, loss, death, marriage,” Bruner said. “These things will be in our lives no matter what, and Shakespeare and the way that the stories are formulated are a safe way for us to examine ourselves and have a little bit of self-reflection.”
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