For years now, HV1 has been touting a major cultural resource just slightly outside our core readership area, in northern Putnam County, as one of the most alluring day trips around: the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. Our Summer 2022 issue of Hudson Valley Explore previewed the exciting prospect of HVSF moving from its longtime rented home at Boscobel House and Gardens to a new site that it would own outright: the former Garrison Golf Course. The 98-acre campus was donated by a longtime supporter, philanthropist Christopher Davis, and for the past two years has been hosting a temporary theater tent while the new owners navigated the tricky waters of municipal permitting review.
That transitional phase is finally complete: “We got our final approval from the [Philipstown] Planning Board in June,” a weary-but-jubilant Davis McCallum told HV1 on Wednesday, September 25, just after the groundbreaking ceremony for Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s first permanent home. McCallum has been the organization’s artistic director for the past decade, shepherding the change of venue through a maze of demands from local officials that included installation of a new traffic signal at one of the site entrances and some scaling-down of the ambitious original plans.
A year-round indoor theater building is no longer on the drawing board, but McCallum said that site excavation and installation of utilities will begin in October for a brand-new summer performance space with open sides. Construction of on-site housing for the performers – until now, shlepped back and forth from a motel in Fishkill – will follow, once the next phase of the capital campaign for the new site has raised the rest of the funding.
The groundbreaking festivities took place on the actual spot where the new theater is to be built, which is at a higher elevation than Boscobel and commands an iconic view northward through the Wey-Gat (Wind Gate), where the Hudson River passes between Storm King in the west and Breakneck Ridge in the east. A group of actors from the HRSF troupe demonstrated how a performance in the new space might look with such a background, carrying giant puppets and singing “Blow, blow, thou winter wind” from As You Like It.
The headliner for the ceremony was Governor Kathy Hochul, who opened her remarks by also quoting the Bard with a line from Troilus and Cressida: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” She recalled how she had fallen instantly in love with the “jaw-droppingly beautiful…place where we can connect nature and culture” when McCallum first showed her around the site in 2021. “I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to help make this happen.’”
The governor was as good as her word, facilitating a total of $13.25 million in state funding for the expansion project, of which $10 million was one of the first Large Capital Improvement Grants for Arts and Culture recently initiated by the New York State Council on the Arts. Hochul used the occasion to announce that the capital grants program has been allocated an additional $80 million to invest in comparable arts projects throughout the state. Noting that New York had hosted a record-breaking 306 million tourists last year, and that visitors had spent five billion dollars in the Hudson Valley alone, she vowed, “We’re going to keep doubling down on arts and culture.”
Projected for completion in time for the 2026 summer season, the 14,850-square-foot timber-frame theater will be the first purpose-built performing arts venue in the country to be certified as LEED Platinum: the highest level of environmental sustainability. The architect, Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang, was a 2011 MacArthur “genius grant” fellow and was awarded the 2013 National Design Award for Architecture from the Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian Design Museum, among a long list of other honors. Gang’s design approach is known for creating a connection between modern architecture and nature, focusing on organic forms and materials. At the groundbreaking, she called the project “a new chapter for Hudson Valley Shakespeare” and said that she was “looking forward to seeing it buzz with actors and theatergoers.”
Starting work on this innovative, site-specific building was the perfect excuse for a rebranding of HVSF. As of that day, McCallum announced, the not-for-profit organization would be known thenceforward simply as Hudson Valley Shakespeare. “It’s now a place as well as a theater company,” he told HV1 afterwards. “We’re evolving from a seasonal festival to a place-based cultural anchor, so we wanted to update our name to reflect that shift.” He also unveiled the new official name for the building itself: the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center. The naming acknowledges the Samuel H. Scripps Foundation’s generous lead gift that jumpstarted the ROOTED capital campaign for the project, which is headed up by HVF board member Fred Rich.
Scripps, whom Rich called “a legend in the theater world,” spent the latter part of his life in Rhinebeck and died in 2007. His grandson, Welland Scripps, noted at the event that, while his grandfather had been “instrumental” in many arts endeavors, including Theatre for a New Audience, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the new permanent home for HVF would be “the most ambitious project his name is associated with.”
Fred Rich pointed out that an additional eight million dollars still need to be raised, and that other naming opportunities, such as for artist housing and garden features, are still available to potential donors. You can learn more about the capital campaign at https://rootedcampaign.hvshakespeare.org, or e-mail Stephanie Paul, interim director of development, at spaul@hvshakespeare.org.
Also speaking at the groundbreaking ceremony were Chris Davis, whose donation of the site made this enormous transition possible in the first place; HVS managing director Kendra Ekelund; and HVS board president Robin Shelby Arbiti, who called the event “a truly magical moment in the life of our theater company.”
Consigli Construction Co., Inc. is the construction manager for the project. Nelson Byrd Woltz is the landscape architecture firm tasked with rehabilitating the former golf course to restore biodiverse native meadows, 25,000 square feet of picnic lawns and ADA-accessible pathways, creating an “experiential sequence” for audiences arriving at the site.
Hudson Valley Shakespeare is hosting its annual fundraising Gala on October 13 (tickets available for $350 and up at https://hvshakespeare.org/production/2024-gala-save-the-date), at which the lineup for the 2025 season will be announced. If all goes well, next year will be the last season performed in the old tent on the new site before the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center opens in all its glory. In the words of Governor Hochul, “There’s going to be nothing like it. It will be the most exceptional place for the experience of theater on Earth.”
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