UAH’s Huntsville Shakespeare brings tragedy, comedy – even a bear – to Botanical Garden

HUNTSVILLE – Everyone thinks they know “Romeo and Juliet” – forbidden love, sword fights, lovers die. Fewer recognize “The Winter’s Tale” – love betrayed, a bear, a lost child, love reconciled.

The founders of Huntsville Shakespeare at the University of Alabama in Huntsville promise to surprise audiences and expand expectations when they stage the Bard’s famous tragedy and obscure comedy at the Huntsville Botanical Garden’s outdoor amphitheater.

Performances are July 26 and Aug. 3 and 9 for “Romeo and Juliet” and July 27 and Aug. 2 and 10 for “The Winter’s Tale.” All shows begin at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at hsvbg.org. Look for Shakespeare in the Garden under the calendar listings for the specific date.

Co-artistic directors Dr. Chad Thomas and Amy Guerin founded Huntsville Shakespeare to give the community a summer “Shakespeare-in-the-park” experience. The company includes UAH students as well as local and regional actors.

2024 marks Huntsville Shakespeare’s seventh season. For the first five years, they staged productions on the UAH campus. Last summer they partnered with the Botanical Garden for two weekends and came close to selling out all shows. This year the garden requested a third weekend.

To fully appreciate Shakespeare, “there really needs to be that spark of live performance,” said Thomas, chair of the UAH Department of English and associate professor of English.

“Shakespeare wrote his plays to be heard and seen, not to be read,” said Guerin, associate professor of theater at UAH. “That’s the advantage of getting these plays out of the book and onto the stage so people can see how funny, how compassionate, how tragic, how relatable, how human they really are.”

Guerin and Thomas appreciate both plays so much that they couldn’t decide who should direct which one.

“One’s about young love gone terribly wrong,” Thomas said. “The other is about reconciliation after an old love that went terribly wrong. One is about tragedy and the death of hope. The other is about renewal and the continuance of hope. These two things just seemed so interesting to both of us.”

So, they tossed a coin. Thomas got the tragedy, which he knew would be a challenge.

“As a teacher of Shakespeare, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is always the hardest sell for my students because everyone knows the story,” he said. “They think they don’t like it because there’s a Taylor Swift song about it. I was really interested in approaching it as an actual play and not as a cultural object. I’m hoping to bring out the humanity in the play rather than what everyone thinks they know or thinks they remember about the play.”

Thomas and Guerin agree that the tragicomic story of “The Winter’s Tale” makes a fine complement to “Romeo and Juliet.”

“The first half of the play is a family tragedy,” Guerin said of “The Winter’s Tale.” “The second half is the story of ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ full of magic and wonder and love-conquers-all happy endings. Smack-dab in the middle, there’s a bear that comes out and kills a guy. The dissonance that all this tragedy, fairy tale and bear create is so intriguing.”

Thomas and Guerin adapted both plays to suit a family-friendly market.

“Our productions are less than 90 minutes,” Guerin said. “We’re not asking you to sit through two and a half to three hours of unabridged Shakespeare. We’re giving you the very best of each of the plays – and that includes this incredibly interesting, little-known comedy, technically, of ‘The Winter’s Tale.’

“We’ve got big plans for a big bear, and we’re really excited.”