The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has named Bill Rauch as the new artistic director. He will succeed artistic director Libby Appel, who will be retiring at the end of the 2007 season. Rauch will work part-time beginning in November of this year to plan the 2008 playbill, select design teams and cast actors for the 11 productions. He begins full-time in June 2007.
Philip Charles Sneed has been appointed producing artistic director for Colorado Shakespeare Festival. He will succeed 17-year veteran PAD, Richard M. Devin, who plans to remain based in Boulder, but travel widely as a lighting designer and arts advocate.
Oregons Shakespeare Festival continued:
“I am overjoyed by this appointment,” said Rauch from his Los Angeles home. “From the moment I first worked in Ashland over five years ago, I fell in love with the Festival’s three-theatre campus, the ever-surprising rotating rep of plays, and the brilliant company of artists and administrators. With our devoted and multi-generational audiences, OSF is a true peoples’ theatre: not only preserving the past, but creating the theatre of the future. Building on the Festival’s distingushed history and Libby Appel’s inspiring legacy in particular, I look forward to partnering with Paul Nicholson to lead OSF to achieve its full potential as both a regional resource and a truly national theatre company.”
A freelance director, Rauch co-founded Cornerstone Theatre in Los Angeles-the nation’s definitive community-based arts organization-where he was artictic director for 20 years. He has directed for five seasons at OSF (HANDLER, HEDDA GABLER, THE COMEDY OF ERRORS, BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON, THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA) as well as at South Coast Repertory Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, Yale Repertory Theatre, Guthrie Theatre, Lincoln Center Theatre, Arena Stage and many others. He has taught at UCLA, USC, California State University-Los Angeles, and is presently the Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at the University of California-Irvine. He is currently co-directing THE FALLS (world premiere by Jeffrey Hatcher) at the Guthrie Theatre and will direct the New York premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s THE CLEAN HOUSE at Lincoln Center Theatre, opening October 2006 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre.
For more information on Bill Rauch, please visit the OSF website at www.osfashland.org
Colorado Shakespeare Festival Continued:
Devin said, “I could not be more pleased with this announcement, I have known and admired Phil Sneed and his work in California for many years. I look forward to a very smooth and exciting transition in the coming weeks.”
Sneed’s experience incorporates a long career of acting, producing, directing and theatre administration, including a total of sixty-six productions of twenty-two of Shakespeare’s plays. He served for twelve years as artistic leader of The Foothill Theatre Company of California, a 29-year-old non-profit professional theatre company, with four performance venues in two states, and an annual budget of one million dollars. For seven of those years, he functioned as producing artistic director, with full responsibility for the financial as well as the artistic aspects of the company. His responsibilities included overseeing all productions of the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and the Sierra Shakespeare Festival (which he founded in 1997).
Prior to that, he was a freelance actor, director and teacher based in San Diego. His involvement in the theatre included work with some of the country’s largest and best-known companies, including the Old Globe, LaJolla Playhouse, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Alliance Theatre and the Indiana Repertory Theatre. Sneed acted at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival from 1978-80, while earning his BFA at CU. He holds his MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and has taught and/or directed at several major universities, including UC-Berkeley.
Sneed said, “I am delighted to be given this chance to return to Boulder, where I received my early theatre training in the undergrduate degree program at CU and also onstage at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. I consider it a rare opportunity, and a privilege, to be asked to lead one of the country’s best-known festivals, especially as it approaches its 50th-anniversary season in 2007. I look forward to working with Dick Devin and the staff in the coming weeks and months, as we seek to honor the traditions of the first half-century, while also moving the Festival in bold new directions for the next fifty years.”