The Utah Shakespeare Festival: A Tony-Winning Gamble
Near Cedar City, Utah
In the spring of nineteen sixty-one, a young theater professor at the College of Southern Utah sat down and asked himself a practical question: how do you give people a reason to stop? The Interstate Fifteen freeway was being planned through southern Utah, and Fred C. Adams, who was on the faculty, could see that the highway would speed travelers past Cedar City without giving them any cause to exit.
His answer was three plays in a wooden theater built on campus to approximate the design of an Elizabethan playhouse. He convinced the institution to back the idea, gathered a small company, and presented the Utah Shakespeare Festival's inaugural season in the summer of nineteen sixty-two. Crowds turned out that first summer, which was extraordinary for a brand-new arts organization in a remote Utah town.
The festival grew steadily over the following decades, adding productions and building better facilities. In the year two thousand, it received the Tony Award for outstanding regional theater, the most prestigious recognition in American professional theater. It now offers a full season of Shakespeare's plays alongside other classic and contemporary works, anchoring Cedar City's identity as a performing arts destination. The theater that was built to catch freeway traffic became one of the foremost Shakespeare companies in North America, and the man who started it with three plays in a wooden pavilion ended up transforming a cattle town into a festival city.
