Asheville’s Montford Park Players hold forth every year in the Hazel Robinson Amphitheatre. If you’ve ever wondered how the troupe got started, you can get the story here. Here’s part of it:
Our theatre company began in 1973, at the municipal park on Montford Avenue, with a rendition of Shakespeare’s ever-popular pastoral comedy As You Like It. A few years later, with our summer program well-established, we began presenting Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as part of Asheville’s winter holiday celebration. …
1997 marked the two hundredth anniversary of Asheville, and we decided to take a part in the celebration by determining which of Shakespeare’s plays was the first to be performed publicly in Asheville, and present that play as our new play for this summer’s season. After months of exhaustive perusal of microfilm records of old newspapers, it was found that on February 14, 1889, in the Opera Hall on the third floor of the old courthouse, William Shakespeare’s As You Like It was presented by the company of Prescott and McLean, featuring Miss Marie Prescott as Rosalind.
Therefore that year, we invited the public to join us for a double celebration. In honor of the Asheville Bicentennial and the Montford Park Players’ twenty-fifth anniversary, we proudly presented the earliest recorded Shakespearean play of both the City and the Company: As You Like It, directed by Hazel Robinson. The Asheville City Council, in recognition of our founder’s contribution to the community, renamed our theater the “Hazel Robinson Amphitheatre.”…
The actors and technicians of the Montford Park Players are all volunteers. In any given year, about two hundred people donate their time, talent, and expertise to our productions. Our membership includes all sorts of people: from young students to retired professors, auto mechanics to librarians, homemakers, news editors, artists and attorneys. We encourage participation by people of all ages and backgrounds, and we celebrate our diversity. What we all hold in common is a love of Shakespeare and a delight in presenting his plays to our friends and neighbors in Western North Carolina. …
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