Quick Take
Santa Cruz Shakespeare announced Monday that it will expand its season in 2026, presenting six full productions, including a second show in the fall.
While the rest of the theater world seems to be dramatically contracting, Santa Cruz Shakespeare — somehow, in some way — is dramatically expanding.
On Monday, Santa Cruz’s premier theater company announced plans for the 2026 season, even as the 2025 season is still unfolding. Two years after expanding its season into autumn, the company will double its output in the fall of ’26 with two plays. Added to the three customary summer productions and the return of the annual holiday version of “The Christmas Carol,” SCS will stage six full productions, marking, in the words of SCS artistic director Charles Pasternak, “the largest footprint this company has ever had.”
For decades, the custom at SCS (and its predecessor company, Shakespeare Santa Cruz) was to stage two Shakespeare plays alongside one non-Shakespeare play. That pattern will hold in 2026 with a production of perhaps Shakespeare’s most popular romance, “Much Ado About Nothing,” alongside perhaps his most suspenseful tragedy, “Macbeth.”
In the non-Shakespeare slot in the summer season, the company will stage, for the first time in its history, a play by one of Black America’s greatest playwrights, August Wilson, presenting Wilson’s signature play, “Fences.”
All that is prologue to a fall season that will feature Noel Coward’s cynically witty comedy “Private Lives” and the romantic musical “The Last Five Years” by Jason Robert Brown.
Pasternak dubbed the theme of the 2026 season “Till death do us part,” a nod to an exploration of partnerships and marriage.
Pasternak also announced that he would direct “Much Ado” in the summer, and take on a leading role in “Private Lives” in the fall. Another of the company’s most prominent players, Paige Lindsey White — playing the title role in “Pericles” this summer — will star as Lady Macbeth in the summer, and opposite Pasternak in “Private Lives.”
Pasternak made the announcement at the Audrey Stanley Grove at DeLaveaga Park, just adjacent to the company’s not-quite-finished new building, housing its professional dressing rooms and its company offices. Alongside brief remarks from SCS managing director Lorne Dechtenberg and its board president, Chris Frost, Pasternak said the current ongoing productions at the Grove — Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” — “are both the best-selling shows in the history of Santa Cruz Shakespeare.”
Both “Midsummer” and “Pericles” are closing this weekend. “Into the Woods” runs through Sept. 7. The company’s fall production, Athol Fugard’s “‘Master Harold’ … and the Boys” opens Sept. 5.
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