Canyon, Amphitheater and Bard

Canyon, Amphitheater and Bard

Just like last year, we visited Cedar City Utah for the Shakespeare Festival.  A lot of this will duplicate what I wrote last year so I’ll just highlight the differences.

We traveled from Cottonwood to Jacob Lake for a 2-night stay.  Took a short hike round the area near the campground.  Not a lot of wildlife but great views.  We also enjoyed the tasty homemade cookies at the Jacob Lake Lodge, and drove down to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  It’s always quieter there than at the South Rim, but this year there weren’t a lot of people.  A walked along the rim a little way and had a picnic lunch, then drove out to a more remote area where there’s an easy nature trail leading to spectacular views of a natural arch.   We made friends with a Canadian man and his teenage son, and recommended our favorite restaurant near Cedar City, which we later found they’d visited.

Unlike last year we had not problems getting up the hill from Vermillion Cliffs to Jacob Lake, and the journey from there to Cedar Breaks was uneventful.  We pulled in to our favorite spot in the National Forest to find another RV already camped there.  This wouldn’t have been a problem – it’s a big area – but the woman was very unfriendly, and told us a lot of her friends would be arriving on the weekend.  While she had no right to make us move, we considered other options.

There’s a campground right at Cedar Breaks National Monument which is usually full, but we discovered there are 6 first-come-first-served sites, 2 of which would accommodate our rig.  The camp host was very nice and suggested we get there before 11am if we wanted one.  So we just spend one night near the unfriendly woman – not seeing here again – and then 2 nights in the campground.  This turned out to be great – there are no hookups for the RV but they have clean showers, and we’re within walking distance of the visitor center and the trails.  This year we’re here in wildflower season and there are spectacular growths of columbine, brilliant purple Markagunt Penstemon  (a local flower that doesn’t look at all like other penstemon), Arizona thistle (which I avoid) and even varieties of sunflower.

We talk to the rangers, and take a walk close to the Alpine Pond, hoping to see marmots or pika, but we have to be satisfied with a cute chipmunk.  The nights are not as cold as in August last year, and on Sunday we drive the steep hill down to Cedar City and check into the KOA campground.  Once settled we go out for dinner at Milt’s Stage Stop, enjoying the prime rib, bountiful salad bar and the hummingbirds (less this year than usual for reasons we’re not sure of) outside the windows.

Then it’s time for Shakespeare.  We jump in with both feet on Monday for a 4.5-hour marathon of Henry VI Part II followed by Henry VI Part III.  It’s in the new “black box” Ames theater, performed in the round, so everyone has an intimate connection to the players.  As expected, the actors give us stellar performances.  We see Henry descend from an idealistic young man into probable insanity, his wife Margaret of Anjou manipulating him and everyone else, as well as Earls, Dukes and other Lords who are mostly just politicians, not much different from those we see today.  Gloucester, the only one other than Henry who is a decent man, is soon removed by the others.

These two plays are among the earliest of The Bard’s writings, and are not considered his best by scholars.  They’re seldom performed and neither of us have seen them.  But the performances kept us not only awake but on the edge of our seats for the whole time.  A great start to the week.  Although there are evening performances, we’ve decided to give tonight a miss after the marathon afternoon.  We do enjoy the outdoor Green Show, where young actors get their chance to shine in 3 different outdoor song, dance and story shows.  Tonight is English night, and we agree it’s one of the best we’ve seen especially when they catapult stuffed sheep into the audience while sharing outrageous puns like “What to you call a sheep in a tutu?     A Baa-lerina!”

Tuesday is a full day.  We start with the Curtain Call Lunch – this year flavorful Mexican tortillas in the company of 4 members of the company.  In the past we’ve had Fred Adams, the Festival’s founder (Still active in this late 80’s) and Brian Vaughn, the Artistic Director, but this year we have 4 actors, one in his 50’s the others much younger, including a student from Southern Utah University in her first season with the Festival.  After the Q&A session we both agree this was really interesting – different questions than the usual mix, allowing us an insight into how actors get hired, and how they develop, here in Cedar City.

Now it’s time for a day of (Shakespearian) tragedy.  The afternoon performance of Hamlet is in the indoor Randall Jones Theater where we’ve discovered we can get great box seats at reasonable prices.  We get clear views of the actor’s faces, sharing their emotions.  We met Andrew May, a very friendly Canadian actor, at lunch and now we see him as the villainous Claudius – a totally different character.  Quinn Mattfield as Hamlet is superb – we can see him wrestle with difficult emotional decisions, and find him totally believable.  This is Shakespeare’s longest play, but again it keeps us involved throughout.

We have dinner in town before heading for another Green Show – Scotland this time, ending with everyone singing Auld Lang Syne.  The tragedy continues in the open a Engelstadt Theater with Macbeth.  A tragedy in two ways - the story, of course, but also the performance.  This was the first Shakespeare play I saw – as a high school student – and one I really enjoy.  While it had its moments, as plays here always do, Vicky and I both found the performances lackluster.   Macbeth’s inner struggle between his inherent decent character and his ambition, and his wife’s descent from her own ambition to madness, just didn’t work for us, nor did MacDuff convince us of his hatred of the protagonist.  We usually find there’s one lay we like less than the others, and this was it.  But a disappointing play here in Cedar City is as good as a mediocre play elsewhere!

From Tragedy to Comedy.  Wednesday afternoon we’re back in our box seats for Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”.  Written as a short play for a privat school when the men were 19 and 23 respectively, it didn’t become a success until they were already celebrated for “Jesus Christ, Superstar:  It tells the biblical story of Joseph in a whimsical style, and this director carried the whimsy further, even make the killing of a sheep hilarious.  Aaron Young, as Joseph, not only looked the part of a young innocent, but carried the show with his strong voice and highly believable acting.  This is one of the shortest musicals ever to be successful in the West End and Broadway/.  The company extended it with a 15-minute curtain call featuring all the upbeat songs from the play, with the words projected so we could sing along.  A great afternoon.

After a dinner of BBQ and an excellent Russian-themed Green Show, it’s back to Shakespeare for another comedy – Twelfth Night.  For the first half hour we get to watch the crew covering the stage with a tarpaulin and then mopping it dry after the storm passes.  Vicky convinced me not to get us seats on the front row of the balcony, and although I had given her a hard time, we’re able to avoid the rain.  Once the storm passes, we enjoy a strongly acted performance.  The casting crew managed to find a Viola, who dresses up as a boy, and a Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother, who actually look alike, so the confusion that is at the heart of the show actually works.  For me, though, the starts of this show were the haughty and conservative steward Malvolio, and the comic characters Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Maria, who make a fool of him.  The comic scenes have us in stitches, and the rain never returns.  This is why we come here every year.

For Thursday we have only an evening show and have planned to spend the day in Zion National Park.  However, with temperatures there forecast for over 100 degrees we re-think this.  There is another Festival in town – formerly called the Neil Simon Festival but now renamed SimonFest, it features newer plays, often with SUU students.  We’ve never attended one of their plays, but “I Hate Hamlet” sounds like fun, especially since we’ve just seen the Danish Play.  The audience is small, but the artistic director gives us some background on the history of the play.  It features a television actor who’s gone to NYC and has been offered the part of Hamlet at Shakespeare in the Park.  He’s ambivalent about it.  He’s staying in an apartment once owned by John Barrymore, the most successful Hamlet of his era, and Barrymore’s ghost coaches the young actor.

We learn that the original “ghost” was a temperamental English actor who would not take direction.  During one performance he ignored the choreographing of a sword fight and actually wounded the other actor, who walked out of the theater and never returned.  No such theatrics this time, but we do enjoy a fun performance - not up to Shakespeare Festival standard, but still worth seeing.

Finally, back to the Engelstadt theater (did I mention it’s modeled after Shakespeare’s Globe) for a new play “The Book of Will”.  It’s a dramatization of how the First Folio of The Bard’s play was assembled.  After his death, three members of his troupe “The King’s Men”  (John Burbage, Henry Condell and John Heminges, realize there are few definitive scripts of the plays, and are particularly disgusted with a performance of Hamlet they see.  With the help of the young son of a rogue publisher, they’re able to assemble the plays and in a touching final scene they present the first copy to Shakespeare’s widow Anne and her daughter.

The play is a thriller, with some comic moments, and you find yourself rooting for the Kings Men.  Several of the actors were ones we had enjoyed lunch with, which, as always added to the experience for us.  This was a brilliant ending to this year’s visit, and we’re already planning for next year.

The plan at this point was to spend the next month making our way through Utah and Colorado to Santa Fe for the opera, but we have someone who wants to rent out our park model in Peoria from August to December, so we need to return and get it ready.  Stay tuned for my next post with a lake cruise in a thunderstorm and more!!