St. Louis Shakespeare Festival

SUPPORT Our 2025 Season & YEAR-ROUND PROGRAMMING:

Shakespeare in Forest Park: Hamlet
MAY 28 - JUNE 22, 2025
Audiences gather in one of the nation's finest public parks to enjoy free Shakespeare under the stars. To mark its 25th production in Shakespeare Glen, the Festival turns to its greatest masterpiece—Hamlet. Directed by the renowned Shakespeare expert Michael Sexton of New York. Audiences can expect a bold modern take on the dark and complex family drama.

NEW! Shakespeare in the Zoo: Romeo & Zooliet 
JULY 8 - AUGUST 17, 2025
Have you ever wondered what happens when the gates of the zoo close and the keepers go home for the night? What if the animals put on their very own Shakespeare performance? That’s the basis for the wild new play created by the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival with the Saint Louis Zoo.

The ground-breaking partnership will launch this summer on Historic Hill at the Saint Louis Zoo featuring stunning animal puppets by Michael Curry Design (The Lion King on Broadway, Disney’s Frozen and Ice Age Live!) in a delightfully playful take on Romeo & Juliet.

TourCo: A Midsummer Night's Dream
AUGUST 19 - SEPTEMBER 12, 2025
TourCo brings a free, abridged production of Shakespeare's classics directly into various community spaces throughout the Missouri/Illinois bi-state region. Actors perform in Shakespeare's original language, not a translation. Before each show, actors lead audiences through a Living Study Guide: a passage from the text is performed in Shakespeare's language and then interpreted in modern vernacular-posing questions and identifying themes. 

This year’s production is a music filled remount of the 2022 TourCo, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by artist Tre’von Griffith with an all-Black cast and creative team.
Nominated for Best Ensemble in a Comedy at the 2022 St. Louis Theater Circle Awards. 

Shakespeare in the Streets: East St. Louis
SEPTEMBER 26 - 28, 2025
We work with residents to tell their stories through an immersive, year-long community engagement theater residency. Those stories are incorporated into a new work inspired by a Shakespeare play and performed for free in the City streets. This year's project, written by DeAsia Page, honors the historic East St. Louis neighborhood. Known as the City of Champions, it’s home to Olympic Gold Medalist Jackie Joyner-Kerse, jazz legend Miles Davis, global dance phenomenon Katherine Dunham and many more artists, poets, and athletes.

PROGRAMS BEHIND THE SCENES

• Sumner High School Arts & Activism Residency: Since 2021, the Festival has worked alongside 4theVille and the Sumner Advisory Board to co-lead the Sumner Recovery Plan, an innovative model of community-based public education that is driving academic achievement and restoring Sumner as a beacon of excellence in St. Louis. Together we mobilize and coordinate a consortium of 17 St. Louis cultural institutions that deliver daily, in-school arts instruction to the next generation of trailblazers. 
• Confluence Regional Writers Project: This program was developed in 2018 to foster a regional culture of playwriting and to uplift Midwest voices by providing support and inspiration to emerging playwrights in the Missouri-Illinois bistate. Over the course of a year, playwrights workshop brand new scripts in writers' retreats, under the guidance of a nationally-produced program director. Their new plays are presented in staged readings as part of the Confluence New Play Festival each Spring.
• School Residencies & Summer Shakespeare Studio: The Festival’s resident teaching artist partners with schools and their drama programs to deliver a variety of Shakespearean education opportunities, from a one-time seminar to a semester-long workshop that culminates in a full performance. Students can also engage with the techniques and stagecraft of Shakespeare through a two-week summer camp program, preparing an abridged version of one of the Bard’s works to be showcased on the mainstage in Shakespeare Glen!