The Bard on the Beach
Near Incline Village, Nevada
On summer evenings the beach at Sand Harbor becomes a theater, and the audience watches Shakespeare with the setting sun and the deep blue lake as a backdrop. The Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, affectionately nicknamed the Bard on the Beach, is one of the most beautifully situated theater festivals in the country. It did not start here.
The festival began in nineteen seventy two on the west shore of the lake, with plays performed on the lawn in front of the Ehrman Mansion at Sugar Pine Point. When that venue no longer worked, the performances moved to a park in Tahoe City. As the crowds kept growing, organizers and Nevada State Parks agreed in nineteen seventy eight to move the festival to Sand Harbor, and shows resumed here in nineteen seventy nine, when volunteers built a modest stage and hundreds of enthusiastic fans turned out for nine performances that August.
The festival grew steadily. By the late nineteen eighties the season stretched to more than a dozen nights and often included works beyond Shakespeare. In the year two thousand a state of the art permanent stage was dedicated, built at a cost of nearly two million dollars.
Today audiences settle onto the sand with picnics and blankets to watch professional actors perform, as the lake darkens and the stars come out over the Sierra Nevada.
