Van and I have just returned from a road trip to Cedar City, Utah, to attend the Shakespeare Festival put on there every summer. We discovered the Festival in 1992 when Van was getting an LLM at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and we went throughout the 1990s. There have been a few changes in the past ten years.
Cedar City and the towns around it have exploded with new businesses and housing developments. We were happy to see a few of our favorites were still going -- even though the quilt shop had moved to a different location, and Pancho and Lefty's Restaurant is now just Lefty's!
The Festival seems as popular as ever, and college students from Southern Utah University still dress in period costumes and participate in a "Greenshow" of dancing and singing appropriate to Shakespeare's time (albeit somewhat tamer than what we remembered). Volunteers with accents and costumes wander through the crowds, selling tarts and programs; but I miss the older woman who kept us entertained in the 90s with bawdy jokes she would sell for a dollar.
The plays were better than ever. We saw, in order of our favorites, HENRY V, COMEDY OF ERRORS, and AS YOU LIKE IT. The first two were outstanding. We had seen HENRY V and AS YOU LIKE IT before, but the third was a new one and played to full slap-stick effect.
I bought fabric to create a wall-hanging for the dining room, and Van sampled craft beers in several brew pubs across Colorado and Kansas: Gella's in Hays, KS; Kanah Canyon in Grand Junction, CO; and Mo's in Beaver, KS.
Great trip!
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