Quick Take
Santa Cruz Shakespeare has announced its play lineup for the 2025 season. Included is Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Pericles," alongside Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods" and a fall production of Athol Fugard's South African drama "Master Harold ... and the Boys."
The 2024 season is still going strong, but Santa Cruz Shakespeare is already making plans for 2025.
With three summer productions wrapping up and a fall show about to debut, SCS announced the plays for its 2025 season on Monday at the Audrey Stanley Grove.
For the first time in decades, the company will do a musical, Stephen Sondheim’s ornate fantasy “Into the Woods,” alongside William Shakespeare’s hugely popular “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The third play in the 2025 summer season will be Shakespeare’s rarely produced “Pericles.”
The fall production in 2025 will be Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold … and the Boys,” a coming-of-age story of a white teen and his relationship with two older Black men in apartheid-era South Africa. The holiday play in 2025 will be the same as it is this year, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens.
SCS Artistic Director Charles Pasternak said on Monday in the announcement to donors, cast and staff that “I always want to do one thing [every year] that scares me.” That scary thing last year was programming five plays for the 2024 calendar year, expanding the season into the fall and reviving the holiday production. This time, Pasternak said, it’s mounting a musical, something that hasn’t been done since “Damn Yankees” was presented by SCS’s predecessor company, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, in 1993.
Shakespeare’s “Midsummer” and the Sondheim musical — both fantastical tales that blend easily in outdoor settings such as the eucalyptus-shaded Grove at DeLaveaga — fit naturally together, said Pasternak, adding he was “surprised” that more theaters don’t stage the two plays together. Mike Ryan, the founding artistic director at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, will return as an actor playing Nick Bottom, the character famously transformed into a donkey, in “Midsummer.”
In announcing the new season, Pasternak said that the ongoing 2024 season is so far “artistically and financially, our best season ever.” Productions of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and “As You Like It” will both close this weekend, and Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” closes Sept. 7. Just days later, on Sept. 11, the first preview performance of “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennesse Williams will be held, followed by its official opening night on Sept. 13.
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