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CEDAR CITY, Utah — Preparations for the 2008 Utah Shakespearean Festival season recently turned from rapid to breakneck, from creative visions of the mind to beautiful and exciting drawings and models. The occasion for this major shift was the annual design and production conference, a series of meetings when all the Festival directors, designers, and production heads met in Cedar City.

Of course, this change didn’t happen overnight, as it might appear to the casual viewer. Designers and directors have been at work for months now to get their visions to this point—where ideas about costumes, set design, music and lighting are firmed up. Now when these theatre professionals arrive in Cedar City in May, they will be able to go right to work turning their visions, drawings, and models into the various worlds that will appear on the Festival stages.

“These meetings help to make sure that everyone is reading off of the same script, so to speak,” said R. Scott Phillips, Festival executive director. “Every play has a certain tone and feeling to it, and often those aspects are open to a wide variety of interpretations. It’s important that everyone know what directors and designers have in mind for their interpretation well before rehearsals actually begin.”

Directors and designers of each of the season’s six plays, as well as The Greenshow, methodically examined and explained their ideas. Directors were able to present their concepts of how each play should look and sound, how they interpreted the motivation of the play’s characters, and the interaction of those characters with each other and their environment.

Providing that environment for the characters to live in, of course, falls into the hands of the set designers. Festival guests who are used to seeing only the finished product would no doubt be somewhat surprised to see the beautiful and often enormous sets that they have come to expect from the Festival in their embryonic stage as sketches and shoebox-sized dioramas.

The play’s environment would not be complete, however, without the lighting, sound, and music direction. These theatrical aspects, vital to the development of the play’s mood and atmosphere, were presented in terms of ideas as to what was hoped to be achieved with these elements, as well as technical considerations.

And where would the Festival be without the magnificent costumes, as well as the outstanding wigs and make-up that really bring the play’s characters to life? These elements were also presented by the respective artists. Costume designs were shown as sketches which, in many cases, were truly works of art in and of themselves.

At this point, one begins to get just an inkling of the tremendous amount of work involved in bringing the Festival to life—and the remarkably short amount of time in which all the magic comes together.

“Right now, the 2008 Festival is only sketches of scenery, rough drawings of costumes, swatches of fabric, ideas, and imagination,” said Phillips. “That’s where we’re at right now: beginnings, dreams, and almost uncontainable expectancy! And that’s what was on the table at these annual meetings. I am very excited to see where this leads in May when the company arrives.”

Tickets are on sale for all plays: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Cyrano de Bergerac, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Fiddler on the Roof, and The School for Wives from June 19 to August 30, and Julius Caesar, Moonlight and Magnolias, and Gaslight from September 19 to October 25. For more information or to order tickets, visit us on the web at www.bard.org, or call the Ticket Office at 1-800-PLAYTIX.

Media Contact: Amanda Caraway, media and public relations director
435-586-1969, 435-592-3616 (cell)
For more information visit: http://www.bard.org/newsroom