Shakespeare Fest Opens 33rd Season at W&M

By WYDaily Staff Wednesday, July 06, 2011

The Virginia Shakespeare Festival will open its 33rd Anniversary season Wednesday with productions of The Comedy of Errors and Hamlet. Performances will be held at Phi Beta Kappa Hall, on the College of William and Mary campus.

The Comedy of Errors opens July 6 and plays Wednesday through Saturday evenings at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., with the final performance July 17. Hamlet opens July 21 and plays the same performance schedule until its closing on July 31.

Both productions have been staged by the festival before but not for some time – 10 years in the case of The Comedy of Errors and 15 since the last production of Hamlet graced the PBK Stage. The shows offer great contrasts in genre, in location, and in periods of Shakespeare’s work during which they were written.  

The Comedy of Errors is one of the Bard’s earlier plays. It's the story of twin brothers and their twin servants, separated in infancy and now searching for each other. Mistaken identity is the key to the farcical action.

Jack Young, former artistic director of the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival and also of the Warehouse Theatre in Greenville, South Carolina, stages this Comedy of Errors in its original Roman setting, albeit a very colorful Roman world that feels much like A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The plot springboards from a Syracusian merchant captured in a hostile city while searching for his lost twin boys. If he does not find them (or someone else) to pay his enormous fine for such trespassing, he may be subject to the ultimate penalty.  

Kevin Hasser, most recently appearing at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. in All’s Well That Ends Well and in First Stage Theatre’s production of Fuddy Mears, plays one of the twins while Nick Ciavarelli, last seen in Much Ado About Nothing at New York’s Frog and Peach Theatre Company, appears as his brother.

While The Comedy of Errors was one of Shakespeare’s early efforts, Hamlet certainly rates as his most mature play, written and produced in the early 1600s.

Virginia Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Christopher Owens says Hamlet's  climactic rapier and dagger duel is staged by Fight Director David Doersch, whose combat was featured in last season’s As You Like It and in the 2006 production of Macbeth. Aaron White stars as Hamlet, and the show features Robert Ierardi as Claudius (a role he played Off-Broadway two years ago), John Michalski as Polonius, Tamara Johnson as Gertrude, and Christine DeMuth as Ophelia (a role she played two years ago at Folger Theatre in DC).

The box office for the Virginia Shakespeare Festival is now open during limited hours. Tickets for individual productions range from $10 to $25, with a season pass to both shows at $40. Tickets may be purchased by phone at 757-221-2674 during regular box office hours of 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 3 p.m. Sunday or anytime online by clicking here.

he Virginia Shakespeare Festival is supported, in part, by grants from the Williamsburg Area Arts Commission and the York County Arts Commission and operates under a Guest Artist contract with Actors Equity Association, the national union of professional actors and stage managers.