A few weeks ago my husband and I attended Disney’s Beauty and the Beast at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the final play for us this season through the ticket package we purchased in February. The season continues until mid-October, but we’ve already seen five of the 11 shows produced this year, taking advantage of special pricing offered by OSF to local patrons. I regret that it took a few years after our move to this area to take advantage of this wonderful resource in our backyard, but each year we attend we reap more rewards for doing so.

The Festival provides enormous benefits to its community, not least among them those of a cultural and economic nature. We rarely attend a play without starting the evening dining out at one of several excellent restaurants in the city of Ashland. Our Beauty and the Beast outing was no different; and because we arrived about an hour ahead of our dinner reservation at Larks, we took the opportunity to browse several of the boutiques, galleries and bookstores that line the main avenue on the border of the theater complex.

Larks Home Kitchen Cuisine‘s full name gives a good indication of its philosophy and menu. Dishes are generous; full of local, seasonal and organic ingredients; and not fussy, but neither are they pedestrian or lacking in flavor. Even the drinks menu features Oregon wines, spirits and beers and herb-infused cocktails. A chalkboard at the entrance to the dining room identifies growers and producers and the items they provide to the current menu, which changes often to match availability of everything from wild mushrooms to steelhead trout. Harry opted for a bowl of soup (a hearty, extremely flavorful chowder) and a generous slab of the smoked meatloaf, while I enjoyed the light house salad with toasted hazelnuts and the cider-brined pork chop.

We declined dessert (Harry had bought two enormous oatmeal-raisin cookies at a bakery up the street for us to enjoy during intermission) and made our way to the lovely outdoor Elizabethan theater. We were well-familiar with the Disney movie but had not seen the Broadway musical and very much enjoyed the staging, the music and the performances. The costuming of the transformed staff of the Beast’s castle was delightfully inventive, and the voices of the key players were strong and true.

On our drive home we discussed how much fun it was to see several of the actors in the ensemble company in more than one play in a season . . . and even over the course of several seasons. We’ve come to recognize and admire certain performers, and I’m sure in the seasons to come our choices for which plays to see will be influenced not only by the playwrights and plotlines but also by which of our favorite players will be in particular roles. This year we watched K.T. Vogt, a veteran of OSF for several years, play a warm yet hilarious Nurse in Shakespeare in Love and a bombastic Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Last year she played the “Sheriff” in a rollicking country-western version of The Yeoman of the Guard, and the year before created two diametrically different characters in Fingersmith and The Cocoanuts.

Last year we observed James Ryen create a comic-serious lead in Vietgone, while this year he presented two blustering, bigger-than-life characters, both self-centered, one essentially good at heart (Ned Alleyn in Shakespeare in Love) and one truly dastardly (Gaston in Beauty and the Beast). We’ve enjoyed watching the lovely (and lovely voiced) Jennie Greenberry take on Ophelia in Hamlet and Cinderella in Into the Woods in previous years and knock it out of the park with her Belle this year. We were introduced to Jamie Ann Romero playing ingenue roles as Viola in Shakespeare in Love and Ann Page in Merry Wives and look forward to seeing her in the future. We also anticipate future great performances from William DeMeritt, who could not have created a more perfect Will Shakespeare in love.

We appreciate the diversity of genres, cultures and styles which the wonderful repertoire at OSF presents, and we’ve come to appreciate even more the talent and range of the actors who portray such an amazing variety of characters over the course of several seasons. With this season not yet finished, we’re already looking forward to next year’s run.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor