Shakespeare 2007: Arts Groups Plan Ambitious Citywide Festival

A number of museums will be involved in "Shakespeare in Washington," including the National Building Museum, which is planning to commission designers to freely imagine designs and stages -- "things that might not ever get built," says executive director Chase W. Rynd. The museum also hopes to build two stages on its grounds -- one indoor and one outdoor, with programming perhaps coming from the Shakespeare Theatre Academy for Classical Acting at George Washington University, according to Rynd.

Kahn will team up with the National Museum of American History and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra for Duke Ellington's musical suite "Such Sweet Thunder," which Kahn will direct.

"We'll intersperse scenes and some spoken words with the music and try to create a real theatrical event out of it," Kahn said. "It's a beautiful score; it's been recorded, but most people don't know it. I didn't really know it until it was brought to me."

As things stand, the Kennedy Center won't actually produce anything -- except whatever related work the National Symphony Orchestra chooses. That marks a change from the center's Stephen Sondheim and Tennessee Williams celebrations and the recent 1940s festival.

"Our role here is purely coordinating," Kaiser said. "Each organization is responsible for its own project, financially and otherwise. What we are doing is coordinating it, and coordinating the marketing -- getting press, and getting people to know about this outside of Washington."

The Kennedy Center already has launched a Web site that will serve as a clearinghouse of information about schedules and tickets, Web links and where to find the events. Most of the productions will be in the obvious places; the Shakespeare Theatre shows will be at the Shakespeare Theatre, for example. But although the Washington Ballet knows what it intends to do -- a program of seven new works by seven choreographers on Shakespearean themes as the latest in its "7 x 7" series -- it does not know where it will perform.

Signature Theatre intends to be in its new building in Shirlington by 2007 and will present a cabaret called "Singing Shakespeare," featuring songs from musicals inspired by the Bard. More for people who like their Shakespeare sung: The Master Chorale of Washington will perform selected opera choruses collectively titled "Shakespeare in Opera." The Washington Concert Opera, the Washington Chorus and the Vocal Arts Society all plan to participate in the festival, as does the Washington Performing Arts Society, though none of those organizations announced specific programs yesterday.

Kahn and Kaiser both asserted that the abundance of yearly Shakespeare programming makes Washington a natural for this kind of festival. "Isn't he the most performed playwright in town?" Kahn asked rhetorically. "Probably outside of London, you can't say that" about another city.

Said Kaiser, "We're hoping that it will be not just for Washington audiences . . . that this will be substantial enough that people will feel compelled to come to Washington from around the country and around the world, as they did for Sondheim."

Big as it is, the festival won't make a point of presenting the entire Shakespearean canon. Kaiser said: "If you were going to touch it all, so much of it would have to be plays, because a lot of the plays have never been turned into something else. There was no goal here to be encyclopedic."

Kaiser and Kahn agreed that their larger ambition is to transcend artistic boundaries, to explore the plays and their myriad adaptations in different formats and different languages while hopefully inspiring audiences -- which tend to self-segregate rather rigidly -- to try something new. Kahn hopes to build incentives into the marketing, offering theater discounts to people who buy ballet tickets, for example.

"The goal," Kaiser said, "is to allow people to experience Shakespeare from so many different formats, in so many different art forms -- the symphonic music, the choral music, the chamber music, the plays, the ballets, the operas, the visual arts, Broadway stuff. That's the point of the festival."

Other announced performers range from jazz musicians Cleo Laine and John Dankworth at the Kennedy Center's Concert Hall to the Tiny Ninja Theater -- which uses small plastic ninja figures to perform plays -- at the center's free Millennium Stage. Kahn also intends to include plenty of educational events and symposiums.

Kahn said: "I don't think that this list is the end of it. I hope . . . that people will start calling and say, 'Gee, I'd like to do this, too.' "

Whether the list will ultimately include smaller organizations such as the non-Equity Washington Shakespeare Company is unclear. Kaiser and Kahn both said this week that 2007 seemed a bit far in the future for the WSC to be making plans, and Kahn said, "I guess we haven't put in any non-Equity companies at all." But WSC Artistic Director Christopher Henley said yesterday that the entire festival was news to him.

The programming is still in such flux that Kahn, when asked earlier this week about a high-tech "The Tempest" that the Kennedy Center will bring into the Terrace Theater from Quebec, replied, "I don't know about that." He added with a laugh, "I'll know it all eventually."