No More Shakespeare in the Park



Those of you who used to live in St. Petersburg may be interested to hear that yesterday the American Stage is going to stop doing their annual Shakespeare in the Park presentations. Basically attendance has has dropped nearly in half in the last seven years or so. (For those of you not from St. Pete, this was an outdoor presentation of an Shakespeare comedy, rewritten into a musical and usually given some funky new setting. Fun stuff.)

It's interesting if you think about why attendance may have dropped so much. It's not like musicals are getting less popular, in fact the opposite is true. Updated Shakespeare is always a big hit. And downtown St. Pete has been on a major upswing in activity -- starting about seven years ago.

And that's the rub, as Shakespeare would say. Downtown is busy now, and too loud for an outdoor presentation of a play like that. When the American Stage started doing these plays St. Pete was a ghost town on the weekends, but now there's traffic and fireworks and large crowds of people milling about. Denem's Landing isn't far enough away from the center of downtown, and after dark it's downwind of some the busiest areas. I understand that the American Stage is going to try to put on an outdoor production of something called "Crowns" to see if that will do better than Shakespeare, but I'm not sure it will make much difference.

Posted: Thu - December 1, 2005 at      

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