History
Established in 1986, the Texas Shakespeare Festival began as Kilgore College's contribution to the Texas Sesquicentennial celebration. The brainchild of Raymond Caldwell, a faculty member within the theatre program at Kilgore College and subsequent Artistic Director of the Festival, the first season of TSF consisted of two plays by Shakespeare and the The Daisy Bradford 3, a regional work commissioned for the celebration telling the story of the East Texas oil boom by Gifford Wingate, all performed by a small company of professional actors. The overwhelming popularity and quality of the summer theatre experience for the people of East Texas catapulted what was to have been a one-time event into an organization that is celebrating its second decade of performances. More than 1000 theatre artists have worked at TSF including such well-known personalities as Michael C Hall (Six Feet Under; Dexter); Danny Pino (Cold Case); Glenn Fleshler (Spring Awakening; Guys and Dolls); Rick Holmes (Spamalot); Andrew Samonsky (South Pacific"; "Tick, Tick, Boom!); Glenn Kessler (Creator, Producer, Director and Actor for Damages); and Keythe Farley (co-author, Batboy, The Musical.)
The Texas Shakespeare Festival is listed as a Major Festival in the book Shakespeare Festivals Around the World by Marcus D. Gregio (Editor), 2004.
Read more about this topic: Texas Shakespeare Festival
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)