The schedule for the 21st Annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare has been posted!
The Festival weekend in Founders’ Theatre will be as follows. Visit the Fall Festival of Shakespeare page for details on in-school performances the week before.
Click here to buy tickets now for the 21st Annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare!
Thursday, November 19
6:30 – Chatham High School – Pericles, Prince of Tyre
8:30 – Lenox Memorial High School – Julius Caesar
Friday, November 20
6:30 – Lee High School – King John
8:30 – Mt. Greylock Regional High School – As You Like It
Saturday, November 21
1:30 – Taconic High School – Macbeth
3:30 – Mount Everett Regional High School – Romeo and Juliet
6:30 – Monument Mountain Regional High School – Richard III
8:30 – Springfield Central High School – The Merry Wives of Windsor
Sunday, November 22
1:30 – Taconic Hills High School – King Lear
3:30 – North Andover High School – As You Like It
5:00 – The Reverence
Also check out the latest Common Class video — the Tech Common Class! (Available at the Fall Festival of Shakespeare’s Facebook Page)
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The 21st Annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare is just around the corner—November 19–22 in Founders’ Theatre—and we couldn’t be more excited! Check out the Fall Festival on Facebook by visiting http://www.facebook.com/fallfestival. Become a fan to get updates as we progress, including photos and video of the Festival in action!
To start, here’s a video of last week’s Common Class in Dance/Movement:
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The Fall Festival of Shakespeare is now over, thanks to the courageous acts of over 450 young artists and their parents, administrators from each of the ten participating high schools, teachers, custodians, bus drivers, and the Shakespeare & Company staff of over forty directors, designers and technicians. All in all, this year’s Fall Festival of Shakespeare drew larger audiences and raised more money than any previous Festival.
We’ve got a special treat for those who couldn’t make it, or those who want to relive the excitement of those four days. Check out the video below to see the entire four days of the Fall Festival of Shakespeare—performances, technical rehearsals, and changeovers—in under four minutes.
This weekend’s 20th Annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare came to a close yesterday after five hundred students performed ten plays for an audience composed of thousands of friends, family and supporters—in just seventy-two hours.
Director of Education Kevin Coleman and Associate Director of Education Jenna Ware were interviewed on WAMC’s Roundtable for this milestone event (along with Ashley, a Lenox High School senior who played Hamlet in this weekend’s Festival). Read and see more about the Fall Festival here and here.
And check out this article in The Independent on Chatham High School’s Hamlet.
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The 20th Annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare kicks off tomorrow evening at Founders’ Theatre. Twenty directors enter ten high schools to produce ten full productions of Shakespeare, involving over five hundred students—and they perform together in just four days.
The Fall Festival was recently featured in an article in the Berkshire Eagle (available online for two weeks), in which it was noted that
For directors, parents and other adults, the festival is a chance to see students come alive.
“There’s something transcendental about the language. I mean, they’re still kids. They’re still teenagers. But during the festival weekend, they scream like it’s a rock concert. They know all the plays and they get all the dirty Elizabethan jokes,” said Dorothy French, a parent.
Shakespeare & Company Director of Education Kevin Coleman speaks about the program in the Berkshire Record, explaining, “We are very interested in firing up the imagination of the students, taking their ideas and seeing how it would work. It is a very different style of directing.” He goes on to say
…it is the things beyond theater that the participants learn, including self confidence, teamwork and public speaking skills, that makes the program a success. “I think they learn important lessons in cooperation and all the other important life skills you can’t teach in a classroom.” Coleman said.
Read the full article at the Berkshire Record’s website. You can read and see more about the Festival here and here. And don’t forget to buy your tickets now for this milestone event.
The exuberance of a rock concert, the camaraderie of a high school pep rally, and the enthusiasm that can only be mustered by several hundred teenaged students armed with Shakespeare’s canon will all be found at Shakespeare & Company’s 20th annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare. This landmark year of this nationally celebrated program will put on display the transformative power of Shakespeare’s words in young people’s lives, as teams of Shakespeare & Company education artists take up residence at local schools and lead students on a nine-week exploration that reveals the vibrancy, power and relevance of Shakespeare’s work in today’s world.
This year’s Festival, its 20th anniversary, is now underway: after two weeks of training in Lenox, the ten teams of Directors—Education Artists from all over the country—have completed recruiting in the schools, auditioning and casting their plays (not to mention cutting the plays down to 90 minutes!). Many schools are holding their first rehearsals today!
The Festival culminates with students from each of the 10 participating schools performing a Shakespeare play at their own school and then again as part of a four-day mini-marathon at Shakespeare & Company’s Founders’ Theatre, where its own Main Stage productions are mounted every summer. Shakespeare & Company’s set, props and costume departments collaborate with the education artists and the students to fashion a unique take on each play. This year’s marathon of student performances runs November 20 through 23.
Check out these videos to see what Fall Festival students and education artists have to say. And if you’ve never experienced the Fall Festival before, make plans to see it this year, November 20th-23rd (ticket info). Continue reading ’20th Annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare Now Underway’
