I’d love to share with you how our {Mostly} Virtual Festival went. Over the course of three weeks (July 17- August 2) we hosted nine virtual programs and one in-person program called the “Soliloquy Stroll.” These dates were the dates where we would have been presenting our Summer Festival production of The Tempest. To remind our audiences of great summers of the past while looking forward to hopefully resuming the Festival in 2021, we shared a wide-array of Shakespeare-related digital programming, most of which was free, on our Facebook and Youtube pages. On Facebook alone, our digital programs have received over 3,800 views so far. Throughout the {Mostly} Virtual Festival, we also continued our online Sonnet of the Day Project which has received over 37,000 views to date.
Our in-person program, the “Soliloquy Stroll”, where patrons encounter actors performing Shakespearean soliloquies around Rockwood Park, sold out in just half a day. We ended up adding a performance date of this program, which will be this Saturday, August 8th. Tickets for that event have also sold out, but an online video recording of the event can still be purchased here. All of our free digital programming from the Festival is available to view anytime on our Facebook and Youtube pages as well as on our website here. We’ve received lots of positive feedback from our patrons who expressed gratitude and excitement over our {Mostly} Virtual Festival after the disappointing news of our postponement of The Tempest.
We began a Sonnet of the Day project on April 3, offering an artist-delivered video every weekday. We hope life can resume some normalcy soon so we don’t have to go through all 154 sonnets! A planned March “salon” called “A Play I Love: Coriolanus” was converted to an online salon, and its success has driven us to plan more, including one that took place in April. Our Shakespeare Day celebration was also converted to a video, which combined some pre-recorded content with live readings.