Utah Shakespeare Festival

Fred Adams founded the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 1961 while serving on the faculty at what was then the College of Southern Utah in Cedar City. He was a theatre professor who had watched a summer tourist stream heading through the region toward Zion, Bryce, and the North Rim without stopping, and he believed an outdoor Shakespeare season would change that. The first season ran in 1962 on a replica of the Globe Theatre stage, outdoors, with a company made mostly of students. Cedar City has never been the same since.

What It Has Become

The festival now runs three state-of-the-art venues inside the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Center for the Arts on the SUU campus at 351 W University Blvd. The season stretches from June through October. Annual attendance tops 100,000 from across the country and abroad. The Tony Award — a Regional Theatre Tony — came in 2000 and remains the primary national credential for a festival that operates at a scale few regional theatres outside major metro areas approach. The budget runs at roughly $8.5 million per season.

More Than the Plays

The Utah Shakespeare Festival has always wrapped programming around the productions: the nightly Greenshow, pre-show orientations, production seminars, backstage tours, and a partnership with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for actor training. Cedar City's summer economy is meaningfully tied to the festival season — hotels, restaurants, and shops in Iron County feel the difference in weeks the festival runs versus weeks it doesn't.

Utah Shakespeare Festival in the 435

For a register of locally rooted Southern Utah organizations, the Utah Shakespeare Festival is the anchor cultural institution of the Iron County corridor. It was started by one professor, built by SUU and the Cedar City community over six decades, and is now one of the most recognized regional Shakespeare festivals in the English-speaking world. Its Cedar City address is where all of that lives.