 Welcome back to In the Studio at Davis Media Access. I'm your host today Madeline Hamaguchi. And I have some special guests with me today from the Davis Shakespeare Festival. Gabi Batista is the development director and Kyle Stoner is an actor in this season. So we're just going to jump right into it. A lot of people come up and ask us about what is the Davis Shakespeare Festival or they say to us. I know there was a Davis Shakespeare Festival in town. So Gabi can you tell us a little bit about, I guess, what is the Davis Shakespeare Festival? What do we do? Good question. Well, the Davis Shakespeare Festival is a festival that goes on through the summer and it actually lasts from mid-June till the end of October. And it's the idea of during the summertime the community can tend to feel empty because students are out, summertime, kids are busy, families are vacationing and sometimes that can leave the town of Davis feeling a little bit lonely. But the idea of the festival about nine years ago was to create an event in which people could go to in Davis to keep the town alive, to keep the town busy and bustling and the vision is to eventually create a destination location for people that live either in Davis or people that live in the surrounding areas to just come and enjoy some theater, enjoy the community, what's around in Davis. I mean, Davis has so much to offer in terms of art and music and culture and I mean it's becoming a well-known establishment even in the recent years. So we have been very excited to be a part of that especially during the summer season. We would call it the slower season but now we even find that it's getting busier now in the recent years. The summer extension is happening with UC Davis and there's newer businesses that are coming through town and so we're actually seeing more community come together even in the summer months and we're very excited to welcome people in and show them our shows and actually educate our audiences with classical plays and off the beaten path musicals and then putting a spin on our Shakespeare shows which are always very exciting. We love to modernize our Shakespeare and even do an outreach with children to teach them that Shakespeare is tangible, it's very colloquial and you can really relate to it even today. Right, it's current, you can understand it because it talks about core human aspects of life. Exactly, yeah. You know, you were mentioning a little bit about the classical plays and the different kinds of plays that the Shakespeare Festival does. And I've noticed that Davis Shakespeare is part of kind of a theater company boom it seems in Davis. It's bringing a particular kind of theater to the town, you know, this bike city theater that does other, you know, different plays, kind of contemporary sketch comedy, stuff like that and then you have Art Theater of Davis doing their thing and Barney Art Theater. So can you tell us a little bit, like, how these classical plays sort of work with Davis to represent? So, like, the mid-summer night's dream last year, for example, that brought in various aspects of Davis in terms of the culture, the town, even how people dress, how people talk, stuff like that. Yeah. It's really exciting to find that now we have a lot of theater companies, I mean, there's been theater companies in Davis that we've been inspired by and now we're finding that there's new developments that we're still inspired by because there's now a company that is doing new works and really challenging Davis to think outside of the box and to educate Davis even more on how important new works are. I think for a Davis Shakespeare Festival what we really love about classics is kind of putting that same or similar edge or approach to it as well. It's challenging the audience in a way of modernizing the text through the theme and through the style, the way we dress the actors, and Rob Salas, who usually directs the Shakespeare, really loves taking the Shakespeare play and modernizing it to a very specific theme. And last year was very special because it was Davis Centennial, so we really wanted to pay homage to that and celebrate Davis the way everyone else was last year as well. We really wanted to honor Davis and tip our hats off to, I don't know, to pay attention to the little things in Davis that you may not notice on the everyday basis, but just how many people ride their bikes and how many bikes that have quirky lights on them or the people that just bring so much character to this town because they've been here for so many years and they just appreciate the history and there are so many Davis locals that just are so proud of having generations just living here and appreciating the growth that has come from that. So we really wanted to specialize in that theme last year and just make it this fun whimsical bike town of mid-summer instead. So having Puck, who Kyle Stoner, played right on how many bikes did you ride on? About seven? Seven or eight, yeah. A lot. Yeah. And that was all sponsored and we borrowed those bikes from Whimsical Bike Man, who has a whole yard full of bikes. He's a cornerstone of Davis, yeah. So it felt like an honor to really focus on that and bring people from all corners of Davis to be a part of this show and it was a really special experience and I think coming from that show we really want to continue to honor Davis in the way that it's helped us out as a theater company so much to expand and grow. We want to make sure that people in Davis really feel honored as well at the fact that we really appreciate the community so we want to share what we design and create with them. And like you said, it goes through to this season and Kyle, could you tell us a little bit about the shows this season? We do have a musical. Yeah, so every year during the summer season we have two shows in repertory. So this year we're doing, on the 20th century is the musical we're doing and then every other day we switch out the show. So it's on the 20th century is the musical and then the play is called Mary Stewart. Cool. It was originally written in 1800 but we're doing an updated translation with modernized text but it's not a Shakespeare play but it's a classical play so we always try to do unique, usually unheard of musical and then a classical play in repertory during the summer season. So on the 20th century it's like a zany satire, it's kind of like this musical theater producer who's washed up but he's on a train from Chicago to New York and he has to essentially write a play and cast a star in the play by the time he gets to New York and it's just this really zany comedy that's kind of like melodrama and satire about them trying to scramble with crazy people on the train and stars and washed up producers and it's a really funny show and so we're doing that show and then on the flip side of the repertory season we're doing Mary Stewart which is a play that was written about a fictional meeting that never happened between Mary Stewart and Queen Elizabeth because Mary Stewart was imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth because of her right to be heir to the throne and so Queen Elizabeth imprisoned her and it's a big story in history but the play that was written in the 1800s added a fictional meeting where they actually met and the play is really cool because the text is beautiful but having these two like towering historical female figures like come together in the same scene is really interesting to watch because there's so much history behind each of them as real figures so it's a really cool play to explore like how their personalities clash and the palace intrigue that happens around the two of them and the revolution that's happening under Mary while she's being imprisoned and so the different thing about this season is that normally when we do the classical play it's generally been a comedy so this year Mary Stewart is a drama I mean there's comedy in it but it's a serious play and it's really interesting and engaging and compelling and so this year we're doing like Zany comedy paired with this drama and it's going to be a really cool season. Yeah that's going to be exciting and Shakespeare too. Yeah so we do the summer festivals those two shows in rep and then in the fall we're doing as you like it which is a comedy Shakespeare's comedy and it's basically about this woman who is banished from the city that she lives in her father's you know a very important man and I don't really know what the concept is going to be as far as design but the play itself is very funny they get banished to the forest and then she has to disguise herself as a man so that nobody in the forest takes advantage of her and then she finds the man that she fell in love with also in the forest but he thinks she's a guy so she's trying to make him fall in love with her by pretending that she's a girl but she is a girl but she's pretending to be a guy who's pretending to be a girl so it's like you know classic Shakespeare basically and it's got some really interesting characters there's the Jester touchstone who's one of the more interesting Shakespeare fools because he's very highly intelligent and sarcastic and and then jake wheeze who has the all the world's a stage speech that's from as you like it there's a lot of really cool things that happen in that play there's also a wrestling match right and you can see on the screen right now we're we have a website I say we David Shakespeare has a website and you can find out more information about each of these plays and a full plot synopsis and look at cast lists and also if you hover over the we're going to transition now and if you hover over the education tab and you click on camp Shakespeare this is another thing under our umbrella we have a few minutes so let's talk about this and then we'll talk a little bit more as well about how you can get involved so just a little short blurb about camp Shakespeare camp Shakespeare is a really great way for children from ages seven to actually even 18 to connect with our festival every season so we take the shows that we are currently doing and we teach them to any child that is interested in learning more about not only Shakespeare but just theatre in general how to design costumes or make a set or even stage combat or Victorian and Renaissance dancing so we take a lot of the elements of what goes into theatre and we bring it to to our kids during camp Shakespeare so we teach them all these elements and then we teach them the plays that are concurrently going on so it's exciting for those kids to get to read the text and get excited about the story and then when they come and see it at the Veterans Memorial Theatre they they light up they get so excited about what they're actually working on can actually look like what they see on stage so yeah and that's it does it it makes the festival more accessible to kids and in that same light as well kids can get involved and how do and in the last you know minute here how are some ways that people like grown-ups can get involved as well well we do have a very vast variety of opportunities to volunteer so usherings included if you're interested in costumes helping out with the set you can go on our website and under support us there's a volunteer link and you can fill out the form and tell us what your interests are and you can come be a part of our festival it's a great way to get to know our company and our family and enjoy your summer with us yeah that would be great yeah it sounds like your David Shakespeare is looking for different kinds of technicians and ushers and even even also monetary support donations you can see the website on the screen there so you can go there to find out all the information you need thank you so much you guys I wish we had more time but it's been great and I hope you come see the Shakespeare festival thank you and we'll see you next time on in the studio