Philip Charles Sneed, who acted with Annette Bening in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s 1980 “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” has come home as the fest’s new producing artistic director.
Sneed, 47, will bow with the nation’s second-oldest Shakespeare fest for its 50th anniversary season next summer. He replaces Richard Devin, who is retiring this month after 17 years, taking over a company struggling with a shrinking budget and plummeting attendance.
“This place has always had a special place in my heart, and my interest in this job has been building for several years,” Sneed said Friday from his home in Nevada City, Calif., where he has overseen both the Sierra Shakespeare Festival and the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival for the past decade. For the past year he also has served as associate director of the Sacramento Theatre Company.
Sneed graduated from Arvada Jr. High School, Golden High School and was one of two members of the University of Colorado’s first graduating MFA theater class in 1980. The other grad was Sam Sandoe, now the senior member of the CSF acting company.
The CSF presents four shows in repertory each summer – two indoors and two in the Mary Rippon amphitheater. Last year, the crowd count was 28,226 – a drop of nearly 14,000 from 2000. Consequently, the annual operating budget has fallen about $200,000, to $896,000.
“That’s the challenge everywhere, and all of us in the field are trying to figure that out,” said Sneed, whose background as an actor, producer and director has made him experienced as both artist and administrator.
Sneed wrote and performed one-man plays about Charles Lindbergh and Henry David Thoreau, which he toured around the west. Under his executive direction, the Sierra fest’s Foothill Theatre Company quadrupled in size. And under his artistic leadership, Sneed started a new-play festival and launched a 12-year international cultural exchange with company in Russia.
Devin cited having to spend more time on fundraising than the creative product as his primary reason for retirement.
“There are those of us like me who actually like that challenge,” said Sneed. “I find fundraising as much of a creative task as the art.”
Sneed will immediately address the need to improve amplification of actors’ outdoor voices. “We’re looking at a lot of different options for improving the sound, and miking the actors is certainly one of them,” he said. “Structural changes to the facility are another option. “My goal is to make real progress by the 50th.”
Sneed said it is too soon to say what titles might be on that 50th anniversary season, but he said it’s likely the bill will include the CSF’s first non-Shakespeare title since Moliere’s “The Would-Be Gentleman” in 1997. “You will see a lot of mixing it up,” he said.
Of the Shakespeare titles, a strong possibility might be “King Lear,” last staged there in 2001. It’s Sneed’s favorite play.
“I think it’s the greatest play written in English, and maybe any language,” he said, “because it addresses all of the most important questions about human existence.
Because he has such an extensive acting background, Sneed said it is also likely he will take to the stage himself.
“When we stabilize it financially, I do think that’s a legitimate use of my time. But I want to consult with the staff on that,” Sneed said. “Not immediately, though, because attention needs to be paid to the overall.”
While Sneed acted with the company from 1978-80, he’s no longer the most accomplished actor in his family, at least not here in Colorado. His daughter, Emily Van Fleet, was nominated for a Denver Post Ovation Award for her performance as Dorothy in the Boulder’s Dinner Theatre’s 2005 “The Wizard of Oz.” Van Fleet, a recent University of Northern Colorado graduate, will next star as Mary Magdalene in Carousel’s “Jesus Christ Superstar,” opening Aug. 18 in Fort Collins.
“I’m very excited to move back and be close to her,” Sneed said.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
