Tuesday, June 21, 2005 | 8:15 a.m.
The 2005 Utah Shakespearean Festival features legends from Shakespeare's timeless plays, along with light-hearted comedies wrapped in the spirit of "Camelot."
A rare treat is in store for those attending this year's festival: A play from a colleague of Shakespeare's.
In its 44th year on the Southern Utah University campus in Cedar City, the Utah Shakespearean Festival will present "Doctor Faustus," the oldest play ever produced at the festival.
"Faustus" offers a battle with the devil himself where everyone pays the consequences of their actions. It's a lesson for everyone, as relevant today as it was 500 years ago, Utah Shakespearean Festival founder Fred Adams said.
"Every person faces choices every day, and each choice has a consequence," Adams said.
The play is a wake-up call to those facing a host of temptations in contemporary life.
"The play says you have a choice," Adams said.
Christopher Marlowe's "Faustus" unveils good and evil in stark terms in one of the oldest dramatic works in English.
The rare production of "Faustus" unfolds as Doctor Faustus confronts attractions of fame, money and power that thwart his path to goodness. Marlowe was Shakespeare's contemporary and wrote this original tale of bargaining with the devil, Adams said. The character of Faustus is a legend from ancient time, and veteran director Howard Jensen plans to offer a frightening spectacle of Elizabethan hell sown from the seeds of greed and vanity.
Marlowe wrote "Faustus" based on an ancient German legend, Adams said.
More than a century ago the 19th-century German poet Goethe wrote a rendition of "Faustus" after reading Marlowe's play. He didn't know it, but at the time Goethe lived 16 miles from where the person upon whom Marlowe modeled the character of Doctor Faustus had lived, Adams said.
For those who like to see Las Vegans in annual Cedar City productions, Phil Hubbard of Las Vegas portrays both the pope and the bad angel in "Doctor Faustus." Hubbard heads the acting department at UNLV.
The festival is also hosting a relatively new production from an Irish playwright. For the newest play presented at the festival, Adams said "Stones in His Pocket," by Marie Jones of Belfast, Ireland, promises to touch the hearts of theatergoers. Two festival favorites, David Ivers and Brian Vaughn, dart in and out of seven or more different roles each, relying on a sudden switch in dialect, a gesture or a change of hats instead of changing scenes and costumes.
This play is contemporary, maybe 5 years old, Adams said. All the characters Ivers and Vaughn will play range in age from 14 to 70 years. Both actors will also assume women's roles.
There's a special treat at the festival, as this year marks the 45th anniversary of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's musical "Camelot."
Festival director Brad Carroll has cast Vaughn as Arthur, Christine Williams as Guenevere and Michael Sharon as Lancelot in the retelling of the Arthurian legend and Arthur's quest for "might for right."
Sharon was playing Macbeth at the Los Angeles Theatre Center until he traveled to Cedar City late in May for the Utah Shakespearean Festival. He also played Leontes in "The Winter's Tale" at the G.B. Shaw Theatre in London.
Sharon spent a year at Bally's in Las Vegas, where he appeared as Samson in "Jubilee!" Sharon received classical training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and is a graduate of the University of Southern California's Division of Drama.
Sharon will also play the dual roles of Oberon and Theseus in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
"Camelot" is based on a well-known legend, and generations have been thrilled by the Arthurian epic in text and onstage. Sir Thomas Mallory wrote of the darker, mystical and bloody edge in his "Le Morte d' Arthur (The Death of Arthur)" in the 15th century.
For "Idylls of the King" in the 19th century, Tennyson raised the play's characters on poetic inspiration. The more modern T.H. White's "The Once and Future King" is the basis for "Camelot."
"I am more interested in the myth of Arthur/Camelot than the history, and I think the vast mythology surrounding it gives us license to create our own version of that mythology," Carroll said.
Adams recalled how he and his wife, Barbara, escorted 47 students from the Branch Agricultural College (now Southern Utah University) on the opening night of "Camelot" in 1960 during a theater tour of New York City. The Utah group read disappointing reviews of the performance the next morning.
Ag College alumnus William Christensen, at the time a vice president of CBS, which backed the play's production, also felt disappointed and decided to do something about it.
Christensen invited the Utah group to a taping of "The Ed Sullivan Show" at CBS studios for a promotion of the musical.
"I remember sitting with Julie Andrews, Richard Burton, Robert Goulet and Stanley Holloway clapping double-time so we'd sound like a much bigger crowd than we were," Adams said. The show's popularity soared, and Goulet performed on the Strip. He also lives in Las Vegas.
Veteran festival director Kathleen F. Conlin promises a production of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" unlike any other seen at Cedar City -- or anywhere else.
Because this Shakespeare play will move into the Randall L. Jones Theatre, instead of performances in the outdoor wooden "O" of the Adams Memorial Theatre, audiences will see more special effects, such as a 1,000-pound mirror floating over the stage that should produce interesting results.
In Shakespeare's comedy "Love's Labour's Lost," new festival director Timothy Douglas will weave clumsy amorous attempts to woo a French queen amid witty dialogue from the likes of actors Leslie Brott, Corliss Preston, David Ivers and Melinda Pfundstein.
A favorite of both the bard and audiences, "Romeo and Juliet," directed by Kate Buckley, will feature festival newcomer Tiffany Scott as Juliet and Paul Hurley as Romeo. Buckley said festival veterans featured throughout the cast promise a new twist to an old favorite.
More than 350 theater professionals arrived at the end of May in Cedar City from 39 states, the District of Columbia, even England, said R. Scott Phillips, festival managing director. "For every person seen onstage, there are seven people behind the scenes that help bring the stories to life on the stages," Phillips said.
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