The Bard Thrives in Rarefied Utah Air : The healthy, mile-high Shakespeare festival is getting even stronger with the help of UC Irvine faculty and drama department students.

The Utah Shakespearean Festival here is thriving as never before in its 32-year history, fueled to a large degree by Southern California talent--much of it from UC Irvine.

When many theater companies around the country are dying or struggling to survive, this festival is not just luring playgoers by the tens of thousands to a mile-high, former iron-mining town where the desert meets the mountains, but is taking aim at a year-round season with plans for an $18-million expansion.

“We’ve definitely become a destination,” said UCI drama professor Cameron Harvey, 45, a producing director of the festival since 1987 who goes back with the company more than two decades in key capacities from lighting designer to theater architect.

Under Harvey’s co-leadership (he is one of four top executives, including founder Fred C. Adams), the festival has grown from a tiny community venture--with a budget of less than $2,000 and 3,276 patrons in its first year--into a professional company with a $2.7-million budget and projected attendance of 128,000 by the time the event ends Sept. 4.

“Tourism sustained us in our early years because we’re near Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon,” Harvey said recently, acknowledging the unusual location for a flourishing classical theater in southern Utah some 170 miles north of Las Vegas.

“People would come to see the spectacular rock formations and squeeze us in. Now that we’ve built a following, it’s often the other way around. They come for us and squeeze in the canyons.”

Although UCI has no official involvement with the festival, there are about a dozen artists and technicians from the university’s School of Fine Arts currently working here. They include four actors; the director of the season’s most daring and acclaimed Shakespeare production; the director of the daily “greenshow,” which precedes all main stage performances; the company manager; the chief production stage manager and another stage manager.

“I can’t deny the connection between the festival and UCI, if only because of the numbers,” Harvey acknowledged. “But I’ve been very careful to keep it from becoming an automatic. UCI faculty and students are certainly favored by the fact that they know me. But if they’re here, it’s because the festival felt they were the best for their jobs.” (Related story, F1.)

The Utah festival--which has a troupe of 41 actors and more than 250 summer staffers--produces Shakespeare under the stars in a picturesque 821-seat Tudor imitation of the legendary Globe Theatre, where the Bard had his plays staged in London four centuries ago.

Classic works by other writers are mounted indoors at an opulent 767-seat contemporary theater. Its glass lobby, when lit up at night, resembles what Adams likes to call “a golden lantern on a hill.”

This summer’s Shakespeare presentations are “Timon of Athens,” never produced during the Bard’s lifetime and a first for the festival, directed by UCI drama professor Robert Cohen; “Richard II,” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The other productions are Moliere’s “Tartuffe,” Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” and “The Royal Family,” a zany piece of lesser-known Broadway fluff from 1920s by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber.

All six plays appear in repertory during 10 weeks from late June through early September. Two productions are offered every day except Sunday, making it possible for theater devotees such as Gerry Devito, a college teacher from Oakland, to see the entire season in three consecutive days.

“I’m so impressed with this place (that) it’s my second time here,” he said on a recent morning at a free literary seminar, one of many daily events to enhance what festival officials call “the Utah Shakespearience.”

(Among these are costume exhibits, backstage tours, falconry demonstrations and a six-course dinner dubbed “The Royal Feaste”--it is served minus utensils, Elizabethan-style, so you must eat with your fingers--while costumed actors impersonate the royal court.)

Devito, a self-described “play hog,” recounted that he had never heard of the Utah festival until last year during a teacher’s reunion in Las Vegas.

“I kind of laughed,” he recalled. “I only went because they’d already purchased the tickets. I was expecting awful things. I was shocked at how good it was.”

Devito, 52, said that two weeks before coming to Cedar City this summer he had attended the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, the largest Shakespeare festival in the country and (with the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego) the oldest.

“To be perfectly honest, I think Ashland is riding on its reputation,” Devito noted. “I think Utah uses more imagination, especially in the outdoor Shakespeare theater. They give the plays more life here. And I think the acting, in terms of the supporting company as a whole, is better.”

In fact, the Utah festival takes its inspiration from the one in Ashland.

Founded in 1935, the Oregon festival mounts an eight-month season of 12 plays in repertory at three theaters and, since 1988, also has produced a six-month season of five plays in Portland. (It tops a list of the nation’s largest nonprofit regional theaters compiled by the New York-based Theatre Communications Group, with total attendance of 446,728 and a 1993 budget of $12.2 million).

“I had worked for a year up in Ashland with Angus Bowmer,” said Adams, 62, referring to the late founder of the Oregon festival. “I thought we could have something like that here. So I started putting together the idea for this festival.”

In 1961, when the Utah festival was founded, Cedar City had a population of 13,000 “counting anything that walked,” he recalled. “People thought I was crazy.”

Adams, a small, bespectacled Utah native with a shock of white hair and an elfin manner, was more calculating than crazy: He took his inspiration not just from Oregon but from local Mormon history.

“When Brigham Young sent the pioneers here for the iron in 1851, two weeks after the wagon trains arrived they were doing Shakespeare,” Adams explained. “They didn’t have houses. They were still living in their wagons. But they mounted an entire production of ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ ”

A century later, in 1958, Adams began teaching drama at the local junior college, after discovering “that Broadway didn’t need another dancer like me.” He mounted three college productions of the Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical “Bells Are Ringing,” Paul Osborn’s “On Borrowed Time” and Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.”

“I could not give tickets away to the musical or the Osborn piece,” he recounted. “But we had to run ‘Taming of the Shrew’ three extra weeks.”

Cedar City now has a population of 18,000. The junior college has become Southern Utah University, which hosts the festival’s outdoor Shakespearean theater on its campus. And Adams looks like a visionary who could give lessons on turning dreams into reality.

UCI’s Cohen admits having been skeptical for a long time about the festival’s prospects, even after he began directing here in 1985. But he has since become “one of Fred’s converts.”

“When he told me 20 years ago they were going to turn their outdoor stage into a replica of the Globe, I thought, ‘Yeah, sure. Lots of luck,’ ” Cohen recalled. “I thought, ‘A theater with more than 800 seats in the middle of nowhere? Who are they kidding?’

“Well, he pulled that one off.

“Then, when they opened their second theater four years ago, I thought they were out of their minds. I know the Ashland story. But the idea that people would flock to Cedar City? Come on! At least Ashland lies between San Francisco and Seattle, two dynamic cultural cities. This place lies between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, which I don’t think are in the same category.”

Now convinced of the festival’s growth, Cohen, who has staged three Shakespeare plays here in addition to “Timon,” predicts its future expansion will help turn Cedar City into “the Aspen of Utah in 10 years.” He even bought land on a nearby mountain this summer to build a second home.

“What the festival has done is simply astonishing,” he said.

Not as astonishing, though, as the plans to come.

By 1997, Adams said, he hopes to have the outdoor Shakespeare productions moved off the university campus and installed across the street, where the festival has been buying land for a two-acre Elizabethan village. A new Globe-style theater would be reconstructed with a removable roof to accommodate year-round performances.

The village itself--to be completed in phases--would contain new scene and costume shops, a Renaissance Study Center, a clock tower, a running brook and swan habitat, an old English bookstore, bakery and sweet shop and, ultimately, a third theater with 250 to 300 seats for new plays by contemporary writers. There are even plans for child-care facilities.

Total cost?

“I’ve got private donors right now willing to help me to the tune of $18 million,” Adams said. “That’s what it will cost. We’ve got more than half the land already. The biggest if is getting the state legislature to buy us the rest of the land for $1.6 million. But we’ve greased the machinery, and we’re politicking hard.”

State officials are scheduled to meet later this month with festival administrators to review the architectural plans for the village complex.

In addition to completing the land purchase, Adams wants the state to pay for maintenance of the buildings once the village is constructed. (About 80% of the festival’s budget comes from box-office revenue and other earned income. Donations and grants cover the difference).

For those who don’t believe Adams can build the complex for $18 million, he points to the festival’s 767-seat Randall L. Jones Theater. It opened in 1989 at a cost of $5.6 million, a third of what it cost for the 750-seat Irvine Barclay Theatre at UCI, which opened a year later and is far less opulent.

The Jones not only has a balcony gilded in 23-karat gold leaf, but superb acoustics for the spoken word (matching the Barclay’s) and technical capabilities even the multiuse Barclay would be hard-pressed to equal with its state-of-the-art equipment.

“We don’t pretend we’ve got a theater for music or opera,” said Harvey, who is largely responsible for the Jones design. “The entire goal was to build a drama house that could truly operate with rotating repertory.

“We wanted to be able to have a different matinee and evening performance running every day yet still be able to use sophisticated scenery and lighting and all the accouterments. We didn’t want to take a bare-bones approach to repertory.”

Consequently, the Jones has huge hidden storage vestibules upstage of its modified-thrust playing area that allow scenery to be rolled away in large pieces. Because sets do not have to be broken down very much, Harvey said, changeovers for different shows can be made in less than two hours by a five-person crew.

The theater is also designed to be audience-friendly, a hallmark of the Utah festival as a whole. Latecomers waiting to be seated during a performance, for example, are ushered into a glass-enclosed foyer at the back of the theater, where they can see what is happening on stage. The sound is piped in.

(Latecomers fare less well at both South Coast Repertory and the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Each provides television monitors in its lobby. The Barclay doesn’t have monitors, due to cost containment, but the building has been wired for them.)

“It’s just as important for us to have a welcoming environment as it is to put on good plays,” Adams said. “I tell my staff we’re not in the play or theater business. We’re in the festival business.

“Remember the Pennsylvania Railroad? It used to be one of the largest corporations in the country, but it made the mistake of thinking it was in the railroad business instead of the people-moving business. If it hadn’t made that mistake, we might be flying on the Pennsylvania Railroad.”

It is precisely the unerring Adams instinct for marketing, however, that makes one wonder whether his projected Shakespearean village will become a “Willie’s World” theme park of sorts, paying more homage to Walt Disney than to the Bard.

But perish the thought. Adams vows that won’t happen.

And Harvey maintains that the only thing remotely Disneyesque about the village will be the illusion it creates of a self-contained universe.

The Utah Shakespearean Festival Center for the Performing Arts--as the complex has been dubbed--will be a playland, of course, but strictly as in land of plays .

“We’re not looking at anything kitschy or cute,” Harvey said.

* The Utah Shakespearean Festival continues through Sept. 4. (801) 586-7878.