There was something just right about the Colorado Shakespeare Festival staging “The Book of Will” in its 65th summer season, marking its return to presenting plays at full pre-pandemic capacity.
Lauren Gunderson’s love letter to Shakespeare began down the road as a world-premiere staging by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ Theatre Company in 2017. The play is a salute to those who rallied after The Bard’s death to preserve and publish his scripts. Had they not, much of Shakespeare’s canon would have been lost to history.
And the Colorado Shakespeare Festival would have been, well, history.
It was good luck that much-honored Denver actor Rodney Lizcano, who was in that original Denver Center cast from its infancy, also happens to be one of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s most popular comic actors going back a decade. “The Book of Will'' was the perfect opportunity for him to make his professional directing debut. Perhaps no one but Gunderson knows the play better. He clearly holds it in his heart like a valentine — and that’s exactly what he delivered in the majesty of the open-air Mary Rippon Amphitheatre, the most natural home for this play possible outside of Shakespeare’s own Globe Theatre in London.
But the real gift of Lizcano’s staging came at the end of the play, which closes with the first few pages of Shakespeare’s collected works rolling off its primitive printing press. But Gunderson gives individual companies creative freedom with the ending. Down in Denver, pages floated from the sky like butterflies, symbolizing the coming collective spread of Shakespeare’s plays throughout the world.
Up in Boulder, Lizcano hit them in the heart with a brilliant conceit no one saw coming.
Over eight minutes, the company performed a montage of moments from across Shakespeare’s canon that perfectly corresponded with moving photo projections from Colorado Shakes history, which drew oohs, aahs and cheers from the audience.
Karen Slack, right, played Beatrice in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's 2009 production of 'Much Ado About Nothing' with 'Geoff Kent.' She revisited a few lines in the 2022 onstage epilogue to 'The Book of Will.'
Lizcano, assisted by dramaturg Heidi Schmidt, chose the scene cuttings and, whenever possible, assigned them to cast members who had performed those very same roles in previous seasons. For example, Chloe McLeod, who played a barmaid in “The Book of Will,” jumped in with a few words as Helena while a bigger-than-life photo of her playing the role in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from the year before was projected. Karen Slack performed for a flash as Beatrice from “Much Ado About Nothing” in front of a photo showing her playing the role in 2009.
If no one in the ‘Book of Will’ cast had played, say, Romeo before, then this was their chance, if only for a few seconds. Christian Ray Robinson took on the famous lover’s lines before a photo of company alum Benjamin Bonenfant playing the doomed lover in 2011.
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival's 1984 program innocuously notes that "Jim (as in Jimmy Smits, who played 'Othello') can be seen in the upcoming NBC pilot, 'Miami Vice.'"
Recent fans might not be aware that a surprising litany of big–name stars have appeared on the Colorado Shakes stage over the years (Jimmy Smits, Annette Bening, Michael Moriarty and Ted Lange, to name a few). That means current company favorites like Sean Scrutchins got to hold Hamlet’s skull center stage before a photo of Iceman himself, Val Kilmer, as he played the brooding prince in 1988.
(Kilmer really did make “The Rip” a cool place to be that summer. He played Hamlet less than two years after "Top Gun" launched him to such celebrity heights that every seat in the 1,000-seat amphitheater was sold before the play even opened, and security had to be hired to snag teen girls who climbed the wall trying to get to him during the performance.)
Lizcano pulled it all off in perfect concert with Projections Designer Garrett Thompson. And speaking of concert, the epilogue was impeccably accompanied by a stirring, percussive original score composed by Jason Ducat. Lighting designer Shannon McKinney had the double-edged challenge of keeping the constantly morphing projections lit, as well as the merry band of live actors coming and going at head-spinning speed.
Ted Lange played the King in "Henry VI Part 2" at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in 1968. Within a year, the future 'Love Boat' actor was starring on Broadway in 'Hair.'
It was, in a word — awesome. One of those rare moments that you know, then and there, you will remember forever. Best of all, this walk down memory lane was the perfect coda to the play we had just seen. It made for a collectively cathartic moment that, Producing Artistic Director Timothy Orr said, “drew a direct line from Shakespeare’s acting company to all Shakespearean companies today.”
And what made it so poignant in that exact moment, Franz added, “was the really powerful notion that none of this exists if it weren’t for this book (of Will). If Shakespeare’s friends hadn’t banded together and preserved those plays, everything that we are at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival would never have been possible.”
In retrospect, Orr now can’t see the play ending any other way — at least on his stage.
“Rodney spent months combing through 65 years of archive photos to create that ending,” Orr said. “It was superb and quite moving for me.”
Note: The True West Awards, now in their 22nd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 of the best stories from the past year without categories or nominations.