Cyrus Porter (Curio) Brandon Carter (Orsino) in Twelfth Night, running through Aug. 2 at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Credit: Jennifer Koskinen
With the opening of its 69th season, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's flagship venue is back online for the first time since the venue went dark for construction in 2023. Credit: Jennifer Koskinen
Summers have looked a little different on the CU Boulder campus lately. Once marked by the thrum of actors, stagehands and audiences at the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre during the annual Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF), the flagship venue has stood quiet for the past two years while the university undertook a $105 million renovation of the Hellems Arts and Sciences building.
The festival continued indoors, but the absence of its historic outdoor home changed the shape of the season on campus.
“A huge part of our summer season is getting the space ready, moving into that space and then having audiences every night during the summer,” says CSF managing director Wendy Franz. “So not having that outdoor part of our summer festival experience, we felt the lack of that.”
That changed in late May when CSF opened its 69th season with Twelfth Night, the first play back in the Rippon since the venue went dark at the end of the 2023 season. The four-show lineup, running through Aug. 2, returns the company to its full repertory rhythm: Twelfth Night and Shakespeare in Love are outside on the Rippon, while Julius Caesar and the world premiere of David Davalos’ Friends/Romans/Countrymen are inside the Roe Green Theatre.
“Both stages are great, but there’s nothing like the Rippon,” says actor Sean Scrutchins, who is in his 12th season with CSF. “You’re out there under the stars, under the weather, and the beautiful thing about that is that even though the show is consistent, the weather and the wildlife are not. You never know what’s gonna happen outdoors, so you have to keep on your toes. And there’s just nothing like performing in front of 800-plus people on a beautiful night full of stars.”
Opened in 1939, the outdoor theater is named for Mary Rippon, who became CU’s first female professor in 1878 and was among the first women to teach at a U.S. state university. Tucked within Hellems, the sandstone amphitheater has long been one of the university’s most recognizable cultural spaces. Since CSF was founded in 1958, the Rippon has also been the place many Coloradans first encountered Shakespeare.
“So many audience members grew up coming with their parents, and when they moved back here, they started bringing their children,” Franz says. “Those sort of legacy things are so special.”
Because the Rippon is a registered landmark, parts of the space couldn’t be dramatically altered. The local red sandstone benches have been rebuilt, the surrounding trees remain and theatergoers can still enjoy the sensation of watching a performance as daylight drains from the sky.
Nearly everything around that experience, however, has changed.
“We didn’t have a lobby before,” Franz says. “You would just walk into a hallway and try to figure out where the theater was. Now, when you walk into the entrance, you see the theater through all these beautiful windows.”
Instead of entering through cramped corridors, audiences now arrive through an open atrium. The renovation added a Stinger’s Café counter, a lobby-level classroom for preshow talks, expanded restrooms, outdoor patios, indirect walkway lighting and four ADA-compliant entrances, with wheelchair seating in every pricing zone.
According to Twelfth Night director Kevin Rich, the space now occupies a middle ground between old and new.
“Being back on the Rippon has been incredible,” Rich says. “I got to direct one of the last shows in the space, Much Ado About Nothing, three summers ago, and now I’m helping to reopen the whole thing. It feels like it’s been both five minutes and also 10 years, right? It’s surreal to be back.”
“In some ways, it feels familiar,” he continues. “In other ways, it feels like an entirely different theater.”
Rich wanted the first production back on the Rippon to make the most of the newly renovated space. In the show’s opening, a funeral for the brother of a wealthy countess becomes the storm that shipwrecks a young woman and her twin brother. As umbrellas rise, Rich explains how lighting designer Shannon McKinney uses the new instruments to suggest rain falling across them.
“It’s just awesome,” Rich says. “And just being back out there, being back under the stars, that hasn’t changed — that is as delightful as it has always been.”
For audiences, the renovated Rippon may feel effortless. For CSF staff, the reopening has been more like launching an entirely new performing arts venue while also producing a four-show repertory season.
The festival built extra time into the schedule for Twelfth Night, giving the production three previews instead of the usual one. That extra week was for discovering what Franz calls the “gremlins” that appear when a new venue meets its first real audiences.
“There’s always something with new venues, so we wanted some time to figure out what those issues would be,” Franz says. “You can’t fully simulate that until you actually have 600 people coming and going.”
The festival’s involvement began long before the first audience arrived. CSF staff spent years in planning conversations with CU project managers, architects and contractors, explaining how a classroom building becomes a theater complex each summer. The company needs dressing rooms, props and sound areas, hair and makeup space, secure front-of-house areas, backstage access and spaces that meet Actors’ Equity Association requirements.
“What’s beautiful is that they not only took the festival into account, but they specifically renovated it with the festival in mind,” says actor Karen Slack, who is in her 11th CSF season. “It's magical that a university would do that, especially since they use it nine months out of the year, and we only use it for three.”
With the Rippon back online, longtime company members are slipping back into old rhythms and rediscovering the complexities and rewards of staging a summerlong theater festival in an unpredictable environment.
“I love that it’s not the same show every time,” Scrutchins says. “It’s nice to have a different energy every other day. It grows you as an artist because you’re tapping into something different.”
This season is built around two pairings. Outside, Twelfth Night and Shakespeare in Love create a romantic outdoor pairing in the Rippon. Franz notes that Shakespeare in Love — Lee Hall’s stage adaptation of the 1998 film starring Gwyneth Paltrow — imagines the Bard’s fictional lover as the inspiration for Twelfth Night, allowing the festival to draw playful connections between the two productions.
Indoors, Julius Caesar and Friends/Romans/Countrymen form a Roman double feature. Shelly Gaza’s modern-dress Julius Caesar imagines a parallel present in which Rome never fell, using projections, phones and social media to explore political collapse. Davalos’ new comedy then shifts the angle toward peripheral characters with jokes that, as Franz notes, land even harder if audiences “see Caesar first.”
To Slack, who plays Brutus in Julius Caesar and Friends/Romans/Countrymen, the modern Caesar expands the festival’s vision of who gets to inhabit Shakespeare’s most famous roles. In Gaza’s production, Brutus and Mark Antony are both played by women as women, changing the tenor of the political tragedy without reducing it to a direct contemporary allegory.
“It changes things,” Slack says. “I’m thrilled and excited to see how it’s all consumed. Hopefully it’s a fabulous, refreshing sorbet — sans blood, which there is a lot of.”
Slack also thinks often about the crew members who make that repertory structure possible — with crews building, striking, rebuilding and resetting scenery throughout the season. There is also the less glamorous work that keeps a summer repertory company running: costumes to adjust, backstage tracks to execute, and, as Slack notes, “so many people [doing] the stinky laundry all summer.”
For all the attention on the restored Rippon, that may be the truest image of CSF back at full strength: actors moving between Shakespearean worlds, audiences finding their way through a transformed building and crews making the whole thing appear seamless by the time the house opens.
“There is so much going on behind the scenes, and the beauty of it is the audience just comes in and sees this gorgeous set, hopefully not even taking into account the magicians behind the curtain,” Slack says. “But they are all magicians.”
ON STAGE: Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Through Aug. 2, Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre and Roe Green Theatre, CU Boulder, 277 University Ave. $31+
