Posted June 10, 2025
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Beyond the new theater rising on a ridge above the river, things are percolating as the acting company now known as Hudson Valley Shakespeare prepares for its 38th and final season under the tent.
After a rebrand, the “festival” suffix moved down the road. “We’re more permanent than ever,” says Davis McCallum, the artistic director, explaining the change. “Festivals are associated with a defined time period and then they head off, like the circus, but we still want to have that celebratory, freewheeling exuberance.”
The Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center is part of a $58 million project that includes the ecological restoration of the former golf course that is now the Hudson Valley Shakespeare campus and the addition of actor housing.
This season, the company’s full-production plays include Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, opening June 6, and The Matchmaker (June 8), by Thornton Wilder, which evolved into the Broadway musical Hello, Dolly! and the 1968 film shot in part at Garrison’s Landing.
Will and Wilder alternate through Aug. 3. Then Octet, written by Beacon resident Dave Malloy, takes over the tent from Aug. 11 to Sept. 7. McCallum pursued the rights to the Tony-nominated play for five years; Hudson Valley Shakespeare is the first company to mount a full production after the show’s Off-Broadway run in 2019.
“The original rights-holders planned a commercial Broadway production and a film, but COVID hit, and it’s only been shown twice since then in limited productions,” says McCallum.
Malloy’s local ties extend to writing the music for Beowulf — A Thousand Years of Baggage, the greatest hit so far by local house-party hosts Jason Craig and Jessica Jelliffe at Banana, Bag & Bodice productions. The following year, 2011, Malloy collaborated with Craig on Beardo, a rock musical about Rasputin. Hudson Valley Shakespeare recently commissioned a work from Banana, Bag & Bodice that’s about halfway completed, says McCallum.
Octet is billed as a “chamber choir musical” that references tarot cards and explores internet addiction and human alienation in the digital age through dialogue and an eight-part acapella harmony score. Only three of the troupe’s regulars could pull off the singing-and-speaking task, so McCallum imported “ringers,” he says.
When the tent goes dark for a week to prepare the production, the company will roll out HVS Cabaret, which transforms The Valley restaurant into a 45-seat cabaret (Aug. 6 to 9). Performances include a solo work-in-progress musical, Fathertime: Birth, Death and Songs, the return of former troupe member Bebe Nicole Simpson and a performance by composer Alex Bechtel.
In addition, a new production of Julius Caesar plays Sept. 9 and 10 for students and the public, with a stripped-down version moving to Bannerman Castle Trust on the island (Sept. 11 to 13).
For the first time, the Shakespeare company will send teaching artists and actors to nearby schools for three weeks in September instead of in the spring. Next year, after the Scripps Theater opens, the company will continue to visit schools and, for the first time, bring students to the grounds.
McCallum, who worked on The Matchmaker 30 years ago in London, considers Wilder to be “the best American playwright. He won two Pulitzers for drama and another one for a novel — the only American author who achieved that.”
For The Matchmaker, wife-and-husband team Nance Williamson and Kurt Rhoads, who live in Philipstown, star as Dolly Levi and Horace Vandergelder. Although overshadowed by the Broadway and movie adaptations, the original play complements The Comedy of Errors, McCallum says.
“It’s uncanny how much these two farces share structure, energy and momentum,” he says. “Our actors are feeding off each other as they go back and forth working on them.”
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