Qualla: Alabama Shakespeare Festival

Alabama Shakespeare Festival: Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The audience for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's first-ever performance, in 1972, consisted of exactly two people: a critic and his wife. The critic declared the show terrible and predicted the festival would not survive. He was spectacularly wrong. From that inauspicious debut in an Anniston High School auditorium, the ASF grew into one of the ten largest Shakespeare festivals in the world, staging more than 400 performances a year for audiences drawn from over 60 countries. The story of how it got from that empty auditorium to a $21.5 million performing arts complex in Montgomery involves stubbornness, creative ambition, near-financial ruin, and one extraordinarily generous couple.

Alabama Shakespeare Festival: Summer Stock and Stubbornness

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The festival started as a summer-stock theater project in Anniston, a small city in northeastern Alabama not typically associated with Shakespeare. The early productions were scrappy and inventive, driven more by enthusiasm than budget. One standout was a production of The Taming...

Alabama Shakespeare Festival: The Blount Gift

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In December 1985, everything changed. Winton and Carolyn Blount donated $21.5 million to build a performing arts complex for the festival -- one of the largest individual gifts to the arts in American history at the time. The complex rose on a 250-acre landscaped park in Montgome...

Alabama Shakespeare Festival: Shakespeare and the Southern Voice

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The ASF stages six to nine productions annually, typically anchored by three Shakespeare plays. But the festival has never been Shakespeare-only. Its programming samples classical and modern playwrights across genres, with a deliberate emphasis on Southern works. The Southern Wri...

Alabama Shakespeare Festival: A Training Ground for Stars

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Until 2009, the ASF operated a Professional Actor Training program in partnership with the University of Alabama, offering a Master of Fine Arts degree in acting. The program produced talent that went on to the highest levels of the profession. Norbert Leo Butz, who graduated fro...

Alabama Shakespeare Festival: Blount Cultural Park

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The ASF shares its 250-acre campus with the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, making the Winton M. Blount Cultural Park a concentrated pocket of arts and culture in a city better known for its civil rights history and state government. The park's English-style landscaping, lake, an...