History
The first production of BSF was A Midsummer Night's Dream which was performed at The Cloisters in Lutherville, Maryland in 1994. The company was founded by Kelley Dunn-Feliz and Richard Feliz that same year. In its early years, the Festival often faced financial instability, scaled back on its productions and went through several management changes.
In 2003, the festival moved to a permanent indoor space within the St Mary's Community Center in the Hampden neighborhood of North Baltimore.
Despite the generous support of an individual donor, who bestowed an endowment of $1,000,000 in 2007, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival closed its doors for good in 2011. By 2010 the endowment's principal, which had been improperly used to pay for operating expenses, had been completely drained in three short years. The Board of Trustees made a simple public pronouncement of the difficulty of producing live theater and announced it was closing its doors due to a lack of funds. No other explanation was made to the public or its private and public donors. The company did not maintain any archives.
In 2012, an amateur group from Carroll County, using the initials BSF and calling themselves the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory, started renting the performance space in St. Mary’s and the outdoor performance space in North Baltimore for periodic performances of Shakespeare. Members of the old Baltimore Shakespeare Festival have been very vocal in their insistence that this new BSF has absolutely no connection with the former BSF.
Read more about this topic: The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival
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