The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival

The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival was a small nonprofit theatre that produced plays by or about Shakespeare in Baltimore, Maryland. It also had an educational program that introduced school children to Shakespeare. The company existed, in different forms from 1994-2010.

Contents

History

The first production of BSF was A Midsummer Night's Dream which was performed at the Cloisters in Brooklandville, Maryland in 1994. The company was founded by Kelley Dunn-Feliz and Richard Feliz that same year. In its early years, the Festival often faced financial instability, scaled back on its productions and went through several management changes.

In 2003, the festival moved to a permanent indoor space within the St Mary's Community Center in the Hampden neighborhood of North Baltimore.

Despite the generous support of an individual donor, who bestowed an endowment of $1,000,000 in 2007, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival closed its doors for good in 2011. By 2010 the endowment's principal, which had been improperly used to pay for operating expenses, had been completely drained in three short years. The Board of Trustees made a simple public pronouncement of the difficulty of producing live theater and announced it was closing its doors due to a lack of funds. No other explanation was made to the public or its private and public donors. The company did not maintain any archives.

Production history

1994

1995

1997

1998

2000

2001

2002-03

2003-04

2004-05

2005-06

2006-07

2007-08

2008-09

2009-10

References

External links