JUNE 2014 BCBusiness 17 PETER HOLST
Christopher Gaze
The founder and creative director of Vancouver's
celebrated annual Shakespeare festival, Bard on
the Beach, shares his plans for the 25th-anniversary
season and reflects on the event's humble beginnings—
and where it is headed next
by Kristen Hilderman
T
his year Bard celebrates
its 25th anniversary.
What's in store?
We held back A Midsum-
mer Night's Dream for this
season. It's such a triumphant,
magical sort of play. We started
with Dream 25 years ago and we'll
do it again. Dean Paul Gibson
will direct it; he directed it for
us seven or eight years ago, and
he's going to refresh what he
did before. We'll do that on the
BMO main stage and with it, Meg
Roe, who directed The Tempest
for us about five years ago in our
little theatre, is going to expand
her production of The Tempest,
because
BMO is three times the
size of the little theatre—740 seats.
The Vancouver Opera, in
collaboration with
UBC Opera
Ensemble, have four perfor-
mances at the end of August
and beginning of September.
I'm doing a retrospective—it's
a performance, if you like—just
memories of Bard. It's not a play;
it's just me, chattering on. I'm just
doing five performances of that.
I'm there almost every day, intro-
ducing the plays every evening
and welcoming everyone, which
I hope to be about a hundred
thousand people.
Bard was established in 1990
with a $35,000 budget and has grown
to a budget of over $5 million. How
have you managed this growth?
It's nothing simple, but with expert
help—a lot of it volunteered—wisdom
that we have sought and used to our
advantage, growth as you well know is
not easy to handle. We've had capacity
seasons where we've sold every ticket.
Our main challenge in the last decade
has been in the last three years. We
moved from a 520-seat theatre—which
wore out for us—to a 740-seat theatre.
Managing that capital campaign,
C u l t u r e
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