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Shakespeare in print -- festival gets national ink By BILL VARBLE In Friday's USA Today, the play was the thing. The Ashland-based Oregon Shakespeare Festival was featured in "The Nation's Newspaper" on the front page of the life section under the headline "Where Shakespeare Reigns." A color photo of actors Amy Cronise and Derrick Lee Weeden in "Othello" is splashed over most of the page. "We knew it was going to hit," Bob Hackett in the OSF's media department said Friday. "We didn't know it was going to look so good." USA Today's reporter, Veronica Gould Stoddart, spent three days around the festival at the beginning of the month, Hackett said. She saw one play, "Othello." Hackett said the festival was delighted with the story. "It's going to be lying around airports all over the country all weekend," he said. The story describes Ashland and the festival in detail. "Sure, it's snug up against the bucolic Siskiyou Mountains in a Southern Oregon landscape straight out of a painting ... But as ground zero for Shakespeare lovers, all Ashland's a stage, and the play's the thing." USA Today says being in love with Shakespeare was the "in" thing in Southern Oregon "even before there was a `Shakespeare in Love,"' the Academy Award-winning movie. The festival drew more than 350,000 playgoers to 762 performances in three venues last year, the highest ticket sales for a U.S. nonprofit professional company. And this year, in the week after the Oscars, OSF ticket sales were 16 percent higher than for the same week in 1998. USA Today's report traces the festival from the familiar (to Southern Oregonians) story of college English teacher Angus Bowmer putting on a couple of plays to today's festival with its estimated $90 million impact. It cites the 1996 film "Romeo and Juliet" as helping to break down American audiences' "Shakes-fear" even before "Shakespeare in Love." The latter is still playing at the Varsity Theatre "to an insider crowd that actually catches all the witty references to the Bard's life and work." The story includes photos of Ashland's downtown Plaza and the OSF's Elizabethan Theatre. Coming in for mention are the Bard's Inn, As You Like It, Puck's Doughnuts, the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, the All's Well Herb and Vitamin Shop and the Tudor Guild Gift Shop. The reporter even found "Bard to the Bone" T-shirts and erasers proclaiming, "Out, Damned Spot." Add "The Shakespeare Revue," a send-up of the Bard by British writers Christopher Luscombe and Malcomb McKee, now playing at the Oregon Cabaret Theatre, and USA Today readers might even start to get bard. There are the obligatory nods to bed-and-breakfasts ("adorable"), restaurants ("surprisingly sophisticated"), and Lithia Park ("English garden-style"). The conclusion? Ashland is "a literary theme park for the `Masterpiece Theater' set." The story reports there are now more than 130 Shakespeare festivals in North America and discusses several. "We thought that was good," Hackett said. "We're pro-other theaters, too." Today's Business Index Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA