Culture In The Middle Of Nowhere

(Two entries a day for two days? Don't get your hopes up that this will continue.)

From the pages of the hometown paper today: the upcoming schedules for our two local cultural institutions — the slate for the 2005 Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the 2004 Britt Festivals.

OSF runs a set of theaters in the small town of Ashland, and was a regular summer destination in my younger days. It's the kind of "local" festival that draws tourists from up and down the Pacific coast and beyond. This year alone, they list eleven plays, including five Shakespearean plays, and the world premiere of Oedipus Complex, drawn from "the works of Sophocles, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sigmund Freud." A city the size of Orlando should be honored to have such a high-quality slate of productions from a single entity, much less Ashland, Oregon, with its roughly 20,000 residents.

Britt is a unique animal: an outdoor stage on an oak-covered hillside overlooking the National Historic Landmark town of Jacksonville. I used to volunteer at Britt to get free admission to the shows — everything from a stripped-down tour of Evita to The Manhattan Transfer. This year's slate makes me want to take trips just to see some of the artists in Britt's informal atmosphere:

• June 19 — Jewel
• June 20 — Huey Lewis and the News
• June 23 — The Hopeful Gospel Quartet with Garrison Keillor
• July 21 — LeAnn Rimes
• July 22 — Indigo Girls
• July 23 — Heart
• Aug. 20 — Chaka Khan (tell me this wouldn't be a hoot?)
• Sept. 12 — Olivia Newton-John (ditto)

Fun stuff.