‘Something that scares me’: Santa Cruz Shakespeare wanders ‘Into the Woods’ in ambitious 2025 season

When, early last year, it came time to decide on what plays to offer his audience in 2025, Charles Pasternak, the artistic director of Santa Cruz Shakespeare, had no idea who might win the 2024 presidential election. 

On one level, such a thing is a silly non sequitur — at that point, he also didn’t know who would win the Super Bowl or Best Documentary Short Subject at the Oscars. What difference does that make?

On another level, however, Pasternak felt a keen sense of being attuned to the larger culture when it comes to programming a theater festival. In his mind, his program needed to fit into a zeitgeist, needed to reflect at least a little bit about what was on the mind of his audience, needed to be relevant to the world people were trying to adapt to.

“I needed this season to stand up,” he said. “I didn’t want it to seem ridiculous if the election went one way or another.”

Following that thread of uncertainty and political turbulence, Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s 2025 summer season has embraced a specific metaphor — the darkness and magic of the forest. In mid-July, the new season opens with a potent double shot: William Shakespeare’s popular fantasy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and Stephen Sondheim’s equally fantastical musical “Into the Woods.” Not only are both plays “in conversation” with each other, they are very much reflective of a political culture in which many people find themselves “in the woods” with no clear path out.

“Midsummer” and “Into the Woods” open a summer season that culminates in Shakespeare’s rarely produced tragicomedy “Pericles,” followed by a fall production of South African playwright Athol Fugard’s “‘Master Harold’ … and The Boys” and a return of the Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol” in December.

Last year marked a big step forward for SCS in what was Pasternak’s first year at the helm as sole artistic director — he shared the title with his outgoing predecessor, Mike Ryan, in 2023. For ’24, the company jumped from three productions a year to five, expanding into the fall for the first time in its four-decades-plus history, and reviving a long-dormant holiday tradition with an inaugural season of “A Christmas Carol.” 

The move was in keeping with Pasternak’s personal mantra to “every year, do something that scares me.” Cranking up production in an industry that everywhere else seems to be in retreat is certainly bold. But Pasternak said that the gamble paid off.

“The summer outsold any of our previous summers,” he said of the season that included Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” as well as Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” and “Hamlet.” “This town is just incredibly impressive in the way it supports art.”

This year’s new gambit is producing a musical. It’s not the first time that SCS or its predecessor company, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, have staged a musical. But the previous time — “Damn Yankees” in 1993 — was so long ago, it barely qualifies as a precedent. 

It also marks an audacious step into the artistic turf of Santa Cruz County’s other professional-grade summer stock theater company, Cabrillo Stage, which has presented exclusively musicals to local audiences every summer for decades. (Ironically, Cabrillo Stage is also doing Sondheim this year. “Sweeney Todd” opens July 18, the same weekend as both “Midsummer” and “Into the Woods” at SCS.) 

Producing a musical is a step outside of the comfort zone at SCS, which typically presents two Shakespeare productions alongside a third play, related in some thematic way. For one thing, a musical demands a different kind of casting. To help with the demands of Sondheim, SCS is turning to Lori Schulman and Jordan Best, the co-founders and artistic directors of the local theater company the Santa Cruz Opera Project. Ideally, musicals include large choruses and live orchestras, neither of which SCS is prepared to do in 2025. This summer’s “Into the Woods” will feature recorded music. As to the idea of bringing a live orchestra to another production, Pasternak said, “That might be something that will scare me in another few years.”

The season’s splashy opening, featuring two crowd-pleasing shows, is balanced by later productions that represent bigger risks. Shakespeare’s “Pericles” is one of the most rarely produced plays in the canon, and, scholars believe, was at least partly written by an innkeeper named George Wilkins. It’s an adventure tale, centered on the title character, a wandering prince who marries a king’s daughter who in turn bears him a daughter. Pericles ends up losing both his wife and daughter, struggling through various other calamities. Yet, the play veers away from a completely tragic ending.

“It’s mythic, it’s fantastic,” said Pasternak of “Pericles,” which he will direct. “It covers seven countries, shipwrecks, duels, deaths at sea, rebirth. It’s an adventure, and like many of Shakespeare’s later plays, it’s about forgiveness.”

The play’s parallel plot focuses on Marina, the daughter of Pericles, who he believes is dead, but has actually been sold into prostitution. “It’s so rarely produced for all the reasons that I love about it,” Pasternak said. “All the adventure stuff makes it hard for traditional theaters to think about, OK, how do I build sets for seven countries?”

Fugard’s “Master Harold” will occupy the fall slot in the SCS schedule, opening for a three-week run Sept. 5. Fugard, who died in March at 92, is widely considered South Africa’s greatest playwright. “Harold” is a semi-autobiographical story of race and privilege during South Africa’s apartheid era. 

“The play is filled with joy and laughter and dancing,” said Pasternak, “but its climax is something that Fugard said was the great shame of his life.”

Both “Pericles” and “Master Harold” represent a break from the broadly popular titles that characterized the 2024 season; “Earnest” and “Hamlet” are two of the most high-profile plays in the English language. Another risk this year on Pasternak’s part is his step back from acting. In his first year as sole artistic director, he also played the demanding title role in “Hamlet” as well as big parts in “As You Like It” and “The Glass Menagerie.” This year, he is not acting, but taking on the director’s role in “Pericles” and the return of “A Christmas Carol” in December. 

He will, however, continue to be on stage in future years: “I believe a leader should lead from the front, and this company has a history of actors in the role of artistic director and I think that’s an incredible thing.”

Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s forward motion is expected to continue into 2026. The company is planning on opening a new building at its home at DeLaveaga Park, which will serve as the company’s offices as well as dressing rooms for its cast and bathrooms for its audiences. To this point, the company has rented mobile facilities for bathrooms and dressing rooms, which costs more than $100,000 a year. 

The building’s capital campaign dates back to before the pandemic, and, after pandemic-related delays and cost spikes, the fundraising is expected to be finished this summer. The building’s cost originally was estimated at about $1 million. That price tag has risen about 50% since that original estimate.

“This building is a sign, a real, tangible sign, that we’re investing in Santa Cruz County,” said SCS managing director Lorne Dechtenberg, in his second season running the logistical/financial side of the company. “We’re not going anywhere.”

In the meantime, Pasternak’s job of “leading from the front” means balancing financial stability with an ambition that shows no signs of letting up. 

“The ambition is year-round programming,” he said. “Maybe in ’26, we add a second show in the fall production. And it doesn’t stop there. Maybe, if ‘Into the Woods’ is a success, my ambition is to add a fourth summer show that’s also a musical in ’27.”

Perhaps as part of the Ripple Effect art festival scheduled for April 2026, Pasternak will stage a one-man show of some kind and colonize the spring part of his calendar. It’s all an effort, he said, to do what new artistic directors in arts organizations often do, pour new energy and new vision into a company early rather than late. 

“Early years take muscle,” he said. “I don’t think that’s going to be the case my entire tenure here. I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I hope it’s quite a long time. And maybe I’ll hit that point where it all feels established and I can take a breath. But I don’t see that point yet.”

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