Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival Announces Its 2019 Summer Season; CYMBELINE, INTO THE WOODS, and More
By: Julie Musbach Oct. 29, 2018
The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival announces the complete lineup for the 2019 Summer Season, including Shakespeare's boisterous MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING and adventure-laden CYMBELINE, alongside the New York premiere of CYRANO, a new adaptation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac written by Jason O'Connell and Brenda Withers. HVSF will also produce its first-ever musical, the Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine classic, INTO THE WOODS. The season will also feature free matinees and touring performances of HVSF's remounted spring 2019 regional school tour of JULIUS CAESAR. Dates and casting will be announced at a later date.
"We've assembled a season of bold, profound, and deeply complex stories," said McCallum. "More than any other venue in the American theater that I know of, the HVSF Theater Tent is the perfect home for these sorts of comical-tragical hybrids. Under our tent, with the Hudson River at our back and the stars overhead, multi-tonal plays can be unfurled with incredible clarity, and I'm thrilled to share these ambitious productions with our audience."
The 2018 Season at HVSF included productions of Shakespeare's RICHARD II and THE TAMING OF THE SHREW (New York Times Critic's Pick), David Farr's THE HEART OF ROBIN HOOD, and the world premiere commission of Seth Bockley's Hudson Valley-focused adaptation ofRIP VAN WINKLE; or, CUT THE OLD MOON INTO STARS, developed with and featuring a cast of 43 citizen actors.
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Directed by May Adrales
Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.
Led by 2018 TCG Alan Schneider Director Award Winner May Adrales, the famous bantering lovers, Benedick and Beatrice, trade barbs while matching wits in Shakespeare's much-loved summer romp.
CYMBELINE
Directed by Davis McCallum
Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.
Cymbeline, king of Britain, mourns the loss of two sons, stolen at birth. Meanwhile, his daughter and heir Imogen plans to marry her true love Posthumus while Imogen's evil queen stepmother works to put her own son on the throne. In this fantastical work from the twilight of Shakespeare's career, all the elements of a great fairytale combine to lead the play's heroine to her happily ever after.
CYRANO
By Jason O'Connell and Brenda Withers
Adapted from the play by Edmond Rostand
Directed by Meredith McDonough
A great nose may be an index of a great soul.
Longtime HVSF company member Jason O'Connell leads a five-person cast as his own Cyrano, the brilliant thinker, wordsmith, and swordsman. He's meet-the-parents material, and everything his one true love, Roxane, should want. But this sophisticated suitor smells a complicated courtship ahead...
INTO THE WOODS
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by James Lapine
Directed by Jenn Thompson
Once upon a time at the edge of the woods...
For its first-ever musical, HVSF will stage Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Tony Award-winning classic on its one-of-a-kind perch above the Hudson River. The beloved Broadway hit weaves together fairytale favorites, spinning a dark tale of magic and its many consequences.
JULIUS CAESAR (Remount of Spring 2019 Regional School Tour)
Directed by Illana Stein
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
A charismatic war hero on the brink of kingship, Caesar is celebrated by the people of Rome - but mistrusted by some of his closest friends who fear his popularity will throw the country into chaos. In our immersive, 90-minute production originally developed with middle and high schoolers in mind, audience members will construct a post-apocalyptic world of power and consequence with their own movement and voices.
Season tickets and single tickets ($10 - $94) will be available for purchase on March 18. Early access to tickets is available for members of HVSF's Saints & Poets Society (March 11) and Festival Circles Program (March 4).
Celebrating its 33rd summer season in 2019, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (HVSF) is a critically acclaimed (The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal), professional, non-profit theater company based in Garrison, NY, one-hour north of Manhattan. The Festival has established a reputation for lucid, engaging, and highly inventive productions staged under an iconic, open-air Theater Tent overlooking the Hudson River at historic Boscobel House and Gardens. In recent years, the Festival has also ventured beyond the Tent, touring its work to other venues throughout the Hudson Valley as part of its HVSF On the Road series, transferring productions to other theaters, engaging its community through radically participatory art-making, and reaching over 50,000 students and educators annually through its year-round Education programs.
HVSF's mission is to engage the widest possible audience in a fresh conversation about what is essential in Shakespeare's plays. The company's theater lives in the here and now, at the intersection of the virtuosity of the actor, the imagination of the audience, and the inspiration of the text.
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