In a devastating blow to both the San Francisco Bay Area and national theatre scenes, California Shakespeare Theater, known universally as Cal Shakes, announced yesterday that it will shut down operations after 50 years offering Shakespeare and other classics at low or no cost in outdoor settings.
“I write today with the heaviest of hearts to let you know that our beloved institution, Cal Shakes, has hit an insurmountable financial impasse and are faced with no alternative but to suspend operations, begin layoffs and take steps towards what will be the ultimate closure of the company,” wrote executive director Clive Worsley on the theatre’s website, and in a mass email.
The theatre’s last tax filing, in 2022, showed its budget near $4.7 million, but fundraising appeals undertaken more recently—including a $350,000 push this past summer to bankroll the September production of As You Like It and a high-profile $100,000 gift earlier this year from one-time audience member and acting student Zendaya, whose mother, Claire Stoermer, worked as the theatre’s house manager—were working toward a more modest $2.5 million budget.
As SF Chronicle critic and reporter Lily Janiak detailed in her news piece yesterday, Cal Shakes’s closure comes on the heels of several other local shutterings: Cutting Ball Theater, PianoFight, Bay Area Children’s Theatre, TheatreFirst, and Exit Theatre. But this is the biggest, most substantial theatre to close in the region, and arguably nationally, since the end of the pandemic lockdown. This despite the fact that San Francisco is the U.S. city with the highest concentration of billionaires.
The closure comes after rocky times for the company, which suspended in-house productions in 2023 in an effort to regroup. Worsley, the theatre’s former director of artistic learning, became executive director and built on a practice that was already in place: of offering one or two summer productions at the picturesque Bruns Memorial Amphitheatre in Orinda, while inviting other groups to perform in the space, under a program called the Shared Light Initiative, for little or no fee.
“The idea is that we become a multidisciplinary performing arts venue,” Worsley told us for a report last fall, “with Cal Shakes as the resident theatre company at the center of it…We will make the space available to other performing arts groups to share the space with their audience, and merge our audiences, and we will also do straight-up revenue-positive rental activities.”
The final production, a staging of As You Like It directed by Elizabeth Carter, ran Sept. 12-29. The future of the Cal Shakes scene shop, where sets for Berkeley Playhouse, Shotgun Players, American Conservatory Theater, and other theatre companies have been built, remains uncertain.
