Shakespeare in the Streets Returns in September

Shakespeare Festival St. Louis has selected the Grove neighborhood as the host of its second annual, wildly popular, Shakespeare in the Streets event, set for Friday through Sunday, Sept. 20-22. The event will feature local Grove residents and community leaders performing alongside professional actors in a new play artfully adapted from one of William Shakespeare's plays.

"The Grove is quickly becoming one of the city's rich jewels," said Rick Dildine, executive director of Shakespeare Festival St. Louis. "It's a destination for restaurants and night-life for many people, and so many others call it home. It has developed so quickly over the past few years that we thought it would have a great story to tell."

The Shakespeare in the Streets artistic team will spend the next seven months in the Grove getting to know the residents, students, community leaders and business owners. Their neighborhood stories will be paired with a Shakespeare play with similar ideas. The combination of narrative and story will lead to an original piece of theatre that will be performed in the street.

"Shakespeare in the Streets allows us to create unexpected theater in unexpected places," Dildine said. "That doesn't mean we're rewriting his stories or altering his work to the point they're unrecognizable, but programs like this and SHAKE38 allow us to explore stories passed down for hundreds of years and find the relevancies in our own lives. They demystify what is commonly considered unapproachable."

The resulting production will be performed at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, September 20-21 and at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 29 in the Grove. The neighborhood runs along Manchester and is bordered by Vandeventer and Kingshighway. Professional actors and community residents will begin their month-long rehearsals in August; all three performances are free. The neighborhood-inspired show represents the largest programming expansion since the founding of Shakespeare Festival St. Louis in 2001.

"We are thrilled to be hosting this year's Shakespeare in the Streets event," said Brooks Goedeker, Community Development Manager for the Grove. "The neighborhood features a diverse set of residents and businesses and welcomes thousands of patrons on a weekly basis. This year's Grove line-up already included an international bike race, a beer festival, a drag show competition and the annual Grove Fest. The only thing that was missing was a Shakespearean theatrical production. Now we have it all."

Details on the cast members and actual play for the Grove performance will be announced this summer.

Last year's inaugural event, "The New World" was based on Shakespeare's "The Tempest," and was performed on Cherokee Street in the Gravois Park/Benton Park West neighborhood. Shop owners and residents performed alongside professional actors in the show. As a result of its impact throughout the city, the Festival was awarded the 2012 Exemplary Community Achievement Award from the Missouri Humanities Council.

In addition to the street event, Dildine, in 2010, created the highly successful SHAKE38 as an around-the-clock, urban experience highlighting Shakespeare's entire 38-play canon and St. Louis' neighborhoods in 38 hours. In 2012, the event was expanded to five days, and this year, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Regional Arts Commission, SHAKE38.com will be launched. The new website will combine elements of Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, and Vine and will allow people from all over the world to upload Shakespeare-inspired art and ideas.

In another first under his tenure, Dildine announced he will be directing the 2013 production of "Twelfth Night," which runs May 24 through June 16 in Shakespeare Glen in Forest Park. Under his watch, the Festival has produced "Hamlet," "Taming of the Shrew" and "Othello," each one drawing record attendance crowds, and garnering nine Kevin Kline Awards nominations, four of them wins, including Best Play ("Hamlet").

In the past 12 years, the Shakespeare Festival has attracted more than 550,000 people to the performances in Forest Park. The organization has reached an additional 250,000 students through its educational touring productions, school program, summer camps and community partnerships. For more information, please visit www.sfstl.com or call 314/531-9800.