Twelfth Night

2007 season · Production archive

Shakespeare’s most beloved comedy brought the Bard back to The Vic. Local legend has it that the theatre, built in 1911 by George W. Swartz and known as the Bungalow from 1911 to 1937, was the first west of the Mississippi to have staged all of Shakespeare’s plays.

Originally commissioned as an ‘entertainment,’ Twelfth Night, or What You Will follows Viola in her rebellious quest to find her brother Sebastian. Set in the very groovy 1960s, the winsome Olivia, roguish Sir Toby, pompous Malvolio and spirited Feste help reveal the secrets of love, laughter and life in the era of free love.

Written by

William Shakespeare

Directed by

Terry Dodd

Ran

January 12 – February 17, 2007

Cast

L. Corwin Christie · Chris Bleau · Stephanie Jones · Wade P. Wood · Harry Cruzan · Theresa Reid

About the production

Of everything the Vic staged in its final six years, this is the production that most directly answered the room. The house existed because a Shakespeare enthusiast built a stage under his own floor in order to read the plays aloud to his neighbours; the claim that the whole canon was performed there before 1937 is the founding story of the building. Putting Twelfth Night back on that stage in 2007 closed a loop about ninety-five years long.

Twelfth Night is also, conveniently, one of the least scenery-dependent comedies in the canon — a shipwreck offstage, a garden, a dark room — which is why it turns up so often in small houses and in the touring and study editions collected by the Folger Shakespeare Library. The 1960s setting was the production’s own; the play does not require one.

Where it sat in the season

It was production 1 of 8 in the Vic’s 2007 season. It was followed by No Sex Please, We’re British (Mar 2 – Apr 7, 2007). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.

The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.

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This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.