Shakespeare As You Like It 2024

8 Dear friends, Welcome to Shakespeare Glen and to the 24 th season of free Shakespeare in Forest Park. Thanks to your passion and enthusiasm, the Festival has grown into the largest free outdoor Shakespeare festival between either coast. And on a given night the audiences here are the largest for Shakespeare anywhere in the world. And although this summer marks the Festival’s 24 th year of offering world-class Shakespeare absolutely free of charge, 2024 actually marks the 206 th year of Shakespeare in St. Louis. A traveling troupe of English actors gave the first performance of Shakespeare west of the Mississippi in the summer of 1818: a production of Henry IV, Part 1 presented in a converted blacksmith’s shop just beyond what is now the right field wall of Busch Stadium. Shakespeare has been a near constant presence in St. Louis ever since. And the history of As You Like It here has been especially rich. It premiered in July 1836 in the upper stories of an old salt warehouse on the current Gateway Arch Park grounds. It was the first Shakespeare play ever performed in Forest Park – and indeed the first show of any kind put on at what is now The Muny – when St. Louis celebrated the tercentennial of Shakespeare’s death in 1916 with an inaugural performance at its new “municipal open-air theatre” between two oak trees. And four years later, WashU presented an all-female student production of As You Like It in the very same spot. So we are especially fortunate that this production is in the hands of Nancy Bell, one St. Louis’s most brilliant and vital theater artists. She has conjured up a world of such extraordinary warmth and depth of feeling, gently showing us the way we are while pointing us ever toward how we might be – if only we saw ourselves and each other as generously as she does. Jaques has the most famous line in “All the world’s a stage”, but Shakespeare gives perhaps the most powerful and most hopeful to the contrite older brother Oliver: “’Twas I, but ‘tis not I.” Transformation is always available to us: as individuals, families and a society. With six simple words Shakespeare reminds us: you can make the world as you like it. Thank you for being here, WELCOME Tom Ridgely PRODUCING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR