Santa Cruz Shakespeare Unveils Thrilling Lineup for 2025 Season
Unifying Theme for 2025 is “No One is Alone” and Explores Ties That Bring Us Together, Featuring Four Productions including a first-ever musical performance
Santa Cruz, CA (August 27, 2024)—Santa Cruz Shakespeare (SCS), celebrating 12 years as a nationally recognized non-profit professional repertory theater company with history in Santa Cruz County going back more than 40 years, has announced its lineup of four productions for its 2025 season. Performances will take place July 13 to September 27 in the Audrey Stanley Grove (The Grove) in Santa Cruz’s DeLaveaga Park.
The productions of the 2025 season include:
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
- Pericles by William Shakespeare and George Wilkins
- Master Harold and the Boys by Athol Fugard
- Into the Woods, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine, licensed by Music Theatre International
“This season’s unifying theme is No One is Alone, as the four masterpieces we’re producing all examine the threads that tie us together, from love, marriage or lust to adventure, catastrophe or redemption,” said Charles Pasternak, SCS artistic director. “Whether it be threads woven by gods or giants, or threads woven by the discovery of our shared humanity, in each of these plays the world is torn apart, sometimes quite literally. But it is knitted anew by recognition – recognition of ourselves in each other, in our need for each other. None of us is an island. We hope the 2025 season helps us consider ourselves in a larger context than that of the individual. We need each other – now more than ever – and through both laughter and heartbreak, this season looks to bring our incredible community closer together.”
About the Plays of the 2025 Season:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
By William Shakespeare
The 2025 season will open with one of Shakespeare’s most famous and beloved works. Midsummer is a perfect evening of theatre, filled with magic, love, wild laughter, and a donkey. In the mystical forest of Arden, the world is pulled apart and woven back together over the course of a single miraculous night. Fleeing lovers and earnest workingmen stumble into the magic of a
fairy kingdom at war with itself. The gleeful fairy, Puck, mischievously joys in switching who loves who. Hijinks and heartbreak ensue. Most famously, the amateur actor Nick Bottom is transformed into an ass before becoming the lover of the Fairy Queen, Titania. But by morning, all is set right, and we return to Athens for a trio of marriages and an amateur performance for the ages. One of the funniest plays ever written, Midsummer celebrates our deep need to gather together, sacrifice and celebrate.
Midsummer was last performed by Santa Cruz Shakespeare in 2016, as part of SCS’ inaugural season in The Grove. It will be directed by Laura Gordon, who most recently directed The Book of Will for SCS in 2023.
Into the Woods
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine, licensed by Music Theatre International
A brilliant pairing with Midsummer, Sondheim’s masterpiece sees another disparate group journeying into the forest, pursuing a wide range of desires: from a simple visit to grandmother’s house, a decent price for a cow, or the magical ingredients to cure a curse of childlessness. Woods honors the various fairy tales it is drawn from and also turns them on their head. It subverts expectations, surprising at every music-filled turn with pathos and humor. Our season title is drawn directly from the gorgeous song of the same name, “No One is Alone,” from Act II; Woods is Sondheim’s incredible meditation on just that – loneliness; messy, painful, or beautiful, as it may be.
Santa Cruz Shakespeare has never produced a musical; though the defunct Shakespeare Santa Cruz programmed the musical Damn Yankees as part of their summer repertory in 1993, 31 years ago. Woods will be directed by Jerry Lee, the Artistic Director of Sierra Repertory Theatre in Sonora, CA. This will be his premiere with SCS.
Pericles
By William Shakespeare and George Wilkins
Shakespeare’s brilliant late romance continues the 2025 season’s sweep into the mythic. The first half of this rarely performed play follows Prince Pericles’ incredible journey through multiple kingdoms, wild adventures, desperate escapes, a magnificent love affair, a pair of storms at sea, and a shipwreck. And that’s just part one. Part two shifts some fourteen years later to Pericles’ daughter, Marina, who must survive her own trials: an assassination attempt, an abduction by pirates, and the violence of a brothel. By the power of her kindness, wit and virtue, she rises above each of these dangers, finally meeting her father. The reunion of Pericles and Marina is one of the most beautiful scenes Shakespeare ever wrote, delivering timeless messages: we cannot survive alone; the coming together of father and daughter is the rebirth of a world – and the play ends, indeed, with another incredible rebirth; and, in love and unity, miracles are possible.
Pericles was last produced by Shakespeare Santa Cruz in 1996. It will be directed by SCS Artistic Director, Charles Pasternak, who most recently directed The Glass Menagerie for SCS in 2024.
“Master Harold” …and the boys
By Athol Fugard
Following the wide-ranging and epic sweep of the summer season, “Master Harold” snaps us into the deeply intimate and intense for SCS’s second annual fall season. Set in the apartheid era of South Africa, we find ourselves in the tea shop of Harold’s family. Young Hally, who is white, spends the afternoon after school in the shop with two of the family’s servants, Sam and Willie, who are black. Over the course of ninety minutes, we bear witness to the shifting relationship between them: a relationship built both on love and respect, as well as one built on bigotry and institutionalized racism. Fugard’s autobiographical masterpiece is both joyous and brutal, with an ending that will leave you both stunned and inspired. It brings home our 2025 season’s theme with a beautiful recognition that led Fugard to become one of the great playwrights of the 20th century.
“Master Harold,” never before produced by SCS, will be directed by SCS Education Director Rebecca Haley Clark, who will be making her debut as a mainstage director for SCS. Clark has previously directed our intern shows over the last three seasons.
The 2025 Season will also include SCS’s Fringe Series, including two staged readings and two performances of the intern show. Titles to be announced later.
Tickets go on sale to members in March 2025 and the general public in May 2025.
SCS Membership
Become a member of SCS to support the 2025 season and its various education programs: the Student Matinee Program (SMAT) which brings high school students from Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, and Monterey counties to The Grove to experience live theatre; the new Shakespeare and Social Justice Program; and study guides for a selection of Shakespeare’s plays to enhance school curricula SCS’s education programs also support the Fringe Show, an all-intern production giving young artists an opportunity to showcase their talents. SCS Members enjoy pre-sales, ticket discounts, early admission, free parking, free drinks and cushioned seats.
About Santa Cruz Shakespeare
Featuring professional actors from around the country and inspired by deep local roots that go back more than 40 years, Santa Cruz Shakespeare stages bold productions of the plays of Shakespeare and other great playwrights that stimulate audiences’ senses and spark their imagination. For more information about SCS, visit santacruzshakespeare.org, Facebook, Instagram or X (formerly Twitter).
