For its 25th anniversary this summer, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival has an ambitious plan to cycle through the Bard’s greatest hits, with A Midsummer’s Night Dream touring parks across the metro area; Hamlet in Forest Park for its free, annual marquee production; and something new just steps away inside the Saint Louis Zoo: Romeo & Zooliet, with puppet versions of a prairie dog and a grizzly bear portraying the star-crossed lovers.
“We sort of imagine this world where there’s different spots on the food chain,” says Tom Ridgely, the festival’s producing artistic director. “It’s like carnivores and herbivores, predators and prey, hunt or be hunted.”
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As Ridgely explains, the 75-minute production is based on a simple concept: What if, after the zoo closes for the night, the animals decide to brush up their Shakespeare and put on a show? The breathtaking puppets are being designed by Michael Curry Designs, the company behind the iconic full-body puppets that starred in Broadway’s The Lion King. The performers are local actors. And the sets? Well, just imagine if a crew of local beavers put their teeth to work to recreate the Globe Theatre.
It’s all in service to a script that offers all the highlights of Shakespeare’s version, streamlined for young audiences but smart enough to satisfy their parents. Says Ridgely, “It’ll be, I think, a perfect balance of the story as we know it and this way it’s never been told.”
Not only will the production break new ground by portraying the Capulets as apex predators (yes, Juliet is the grizzly, while her fair Romeo hangs back with the rodents), but Ridgely says a collaboration with the zoo is new not just for St. Louis, but new for any theater company. “No one’s ever tried to do a full-on theatrical presentation in a zoo,” he says. “So it’s not only the first Romeo and Zooliet or the first Shakespeare production—it’s the first time anyone’s done an honest-to-goodness play in a zoo.” Fortunately, the Saint Louis Zoo proved to be not only a willing partner, but had the perfect area to stage, on the Historic Hill that includes many of its oldest buildings.
“We’re essentially creating a little mini Shakespeare Glen right there in the heart of the original part of the zoo,” Ridgely observes.
Before Romeo & Zooliet’s six-week run beginning in July, Hamlet should be a showstopper in the real Shakespeare Glen for this year’s Shakespeare in the Park. The festival has hired New Yorker Michael Sexton to direct, with midcentury America subbing in for Denmark. Ridgely says it will be “very sleek, very sexy, very cool and urban,” with a focus on “the intersection of political and financial power.”
And that’s not all. In addition to a remounting of 2022’s traveling TourCo production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the festival will head across the river for Shakespeare in the Streets: East St. Louis this September. The production will bring to life an original play by DeAsia Paige, who was previously a reporter with the Belleville News-Democrat and SLM culture writer.
Ridgely hopes to build on the festival’s 2023 success with the soccer-inspired The Game’s Afoot, written by Post-Dispatch columnist Benjamin Hochman. “That showed us that a journalist can be great for this, which is almost like an investigative process and could be even better than a playwright for as far as telling the Shakespeare in the Streets story.”
Romeo & Zooliet tickets go on sale April 23. Sign up online to stay in the loop. Full season details are also online.
