Welcome to the 19th season
of the
Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival
of the
Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival
Featuring 
While West Michigan is cooling down for the fall, the annual Shakespeare Festival is just heating up. Passions and tempers will run high as the alarms of war sound on our stages this season. Our festival is filled with exceptional entertaining, enriching, and fun events that you will want to attend. Please use our events calendar to plan your time to attend.
Our last two season brought love comedies to our festival mainstage with productions of Twelfth Night in 2011 and As You Like It in 2010. This
season will be filled with other strong emotions as the winter of discontent falls early onto the Mainstage production of Shakespeare’s complex tragedy Richard III. Prepare for deceit, conceit, seduction, hatred, mischief, mayhem, villainy, murder, and evil. Bring a horse if you have one, 
because Richard’s going to need it. This production expands some on Shakespeare’s classic text with a few added moments from Shakespeare’s history trilogy Henry VI in order to contextualize some of the backstory to the conflict. And there will be conflict as civil war reigns and the future of the throne is at stake because a “world is grown so bad / That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.”
Veteran Equity actor Brian Webb Russell is “determined to prove a villain” by taking on the challenging title role of one of Shakespeare’s most notorious and evil characters. Webb performed previously for the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival as Oberon/Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2008 and as both Antipholus twins in Comedy of Errors in 2000.
season will be filled with other strong emotions as the winter of discontent falls early onto the Mainstage production of Shakespeare’s complex tragedy Richard III. Prepare for deceit, conceit, seduction, hatred, mischief, mayhem, villainy, murder, and evil. Bring a horse if you have one, because Richard’s going to need it. This production expands some on Shakespeare’s classic text with a few added moments from Shakespeare’s history trilogy Henry VI in order to contextualize some of the backstory to the conflict. And there will be conflict as civil war reigns and the future of the throne is at stake because a “world is grown so bad / That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.” Veteran Equity actor Brian Webb Russell is “determined to prove a villain” by taking on the challenging title role of one of Shakespeare’s most notorious and evil characters. Webb performed previously for the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival as Oberon/Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2008 and as both Antipholus twins in Comedy of Errors in 2000. This season’s Bard to Go also examines conflict and war with the return of 
All’s Fair . . .. Bard to Go will be performing first on the Allendale campus on October 5 before embarking on their annual fall tour of area schools in October and the first of November. They will also perform in downtown Grand Rapids to conclude this season’s festival on November 3 along with the awards ceremony for the festival Student Competition.
All’s Fair . . .. Bard to Go will be performing first on the Allendale campus on October 5 before embarking on their annual fall tour of area schools in October and the first of November. They will also perform in downtown Grand Rapids to conclude this season’s festival on November 3 along with the awards ceremony for the festival Student Competition. The Shakespeare Festival is
also partnering with Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company to host the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival Conference, an academic conference focused on Shakespeare: Pedagogy and Performance. The conference will be for registered attendees but will also feature a public keynote address by the festival Guest Resident Scholar Carole Levin, PhD. The festival also welcomes the return of the Grand Valley Renaissance Faire, which will include performances by the Shakespeare Festival “Greenshow” featuring “Pyramus and Thisbe” adapted from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Please browse this site to review all of the festival events. Make your plans to attend as much of the festival as your time permits, you’ll love it. We appreciate your attendance and your support and are interested in hearing from you. Please offer any feedback you would like to provide on our feedback page.
Page last modified September 15, 2012
