History
CST was founded as the Chicago Shakespeare Workshop by current Artistic Director Barbara Gaines in 1986, a name which was changed a year later to the Chicago Shakespeare Repertory and finally in 1999 to Chicago Shakespeare Theater. It performed its first twelve seasons in residency at the Ruth Page Theater, where it performed titles ranging from better-known Shakespeare plays such as Hamlet and King Lear as well as lesser-known titles such as Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens. Although the theater was critically lauded for its innovative approach to classic works, it was limited by the age and spatial restrictions of the Ruth Page Theater and began looking for a new performance space in the late 1990s.
In 1997, CST announced its plans to move from the Ruth Page to a new facility located at Navy Pier, a place better known for its family attractions and in fact the most popular tourist attraction in the Midwest. The move was accompanied by a public relations blitz, which even involved Mayor Richard M. Daley naming April 23, 1997 Shakespeare Repertory Day. The company began a large-scale capital campaign to finance the move, and finally opened its year 2000 season in its new, state-of-the-art facility. Since then, CST has grown from the third-largest theater company in Chicago to the third-largest in the entire Midwest, at a rate 400% faster than the industry growth trend.
Read more about this topic: Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernisms high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)