Summer theater returns to Woodland Park

Lexington’s annual outdoor summer theater festival is going home.

For the first time since 1996, the words of William Shakespeare will waft through the leaves and across the lawns of Woodland Park as SummerFest makes a new home in the same spot where Lexington’s summer theater tradition started 34 years ago.

Back then, the event was known as Shakespeare in the Park, later dubbed the Lexington Shakespeare Festival. The latter’s demise in 2006 gave birth to Summerfest, which has since carried on the summer theater tradition, at the Shakespeare Festival’s last home of the Arboretum on Alumni Drive and then the last two years at the MoonDance at Midnight Pass amphitheater.

MoonDance was, by all appearances and accounts, a happy home for the event, which presents two productions in July. But then the Lexington Department of Parks and Recreation presented SummerFest with a tantalizing opportunity.

“The nostalgia alone of going back there was very appealing,” festival director Wesley Nelson says. “People tell us all the time, ‘We really miss when it was at Woodland Park.’”

That’s where the summer theater event started in 1982 and ran for more than a decade, with a brief diversion to Bell Court. Many theater fans lovingly remember those nights of Shakespeare and contemporary works under the park’s trees and in the middle of the city, where passersby would occasionally offer their own comments on the shows.

Over the years, the crowds grew, and directors eventually felt they outgrew the park setting, and moved the the Lexington Shakespeare Festival to the Arboretum in 1997. There, the event did flourish for many years, commanding crowds of more than 2,000 some nights for productions such as To Kill a Mockingbird in 1999 and Jesus Christ Superstar in 2004.

But the Shakespeare Festival folded in 2006, its board citing financial concerns. The following year, SummerFest announced it would carry on, as it has for 10 years.

In 2014, SummerFest moved from the Arboretum to the MoonDance amphitheater in the Beaumont neighborhood, directors saying the venue’s permanent stage would allow them to focus on producing shows, as opposed to annually building a theater in the middle of an empty field.

While that was working well, Lexington Parks and Recreation Department Cultural Arts Manager Amber Luallen says the idea of moving SummerFest was a result of contemplating how to better utilize resources. Though the theater event had moved, Ballet Under the Stars, which was created due to the presence of the Shakespeare stage in the park, remained.

“It seemed like a lot of effort to build the stage every year for a one-week event,” Luallen said. “So we were asking what else we could do with it.”

Meanwhile, in Beaumont, while SummerFest appeared to be going well, the month of nightly activity and later-evening shows was straining the patience of some residents near the venue, and it also interrupted what had become a successful Friday night music series.

Also, Nelson and Luallen point out, some of the concerns that initially prompted the event to move 20 years ago had been addressed. Audiences for the event are smaller than its late 1990s/early 2000s peak, though they are still strong.

Also, the move from Woodland was in part prompted by the event’s decision to start charging admission, and questions about how that could be done in the park. Since then, Luallen says Ballet Under the Stars has taught city officials how to control access to the event area.

She adds that the move has been met with enthusiastic support from neighbors and businesses, and that it means the park will be filled with arts events from late June into the middle of August, when the Woodland Art Fair brings the summer season to a close.

The park will get a summer theater event that has evolved significantly since it left. Summerfest now presents two productions instead of three, and it presents them in alternating weekends over four weeks, a move Nelson says has been popular with audiences. It also presents musicals now, and this year, it also being SummerFest’s 10th anniversary, will be a historic indulgence.

“The very first play presented in the park was Shakespeare’s As You Like It, so we’re bringing that back,” Nelson said. The festival will also return to the first musical it presented in its current musical era: 2004's Jesus Christ Superstar. (Previously, the festival presented Pippin in 1989 and Godspell in 1990.)

Nelson and Luallen said finalizing the decision to move took about a month of addressing concerns and issues the move raised. But in the end, it felt perfect, they said.

“It’s interesting how things happen,” Nelson said. “In our 10th year, it seemed like a perfect time to go home.”

Editor's note: This story has been altered from its original version to correct the history of musicals in the series.

This story was originally published April 8, 2016 at 8:19 AM with the headline "Summer theater returns to Woodland Park."