The road to opening Vancouver's Shakespeare festival

On opening night of Bard on the Beach in summer 1990, a Coast Guard vessel cut through False Creek carrying Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare himself—or rather, Vancouver actress Gillian Barber and local actor John Payne in period costume. Though Barber was pregnant at the time, laced into a corset and overcome by diesel fumes, she managed to descend a red carpet on the dock for cameras. The group strolled through Vanier Park past street performers and jugglers, stopped for speeches, then led the audience into a tent.

Christopher Gaze's sons—Josh, nearly nine, and Zac, seven—handed out programs in custom Elizabethan outfits made by Gaze's mother-in-law. It was a family affair from the start, held together by volunteer labor and a founder's sheer determination.

That opening night, people loved the show. Theatre critic Max Wyman of the Province called it "good old-fashioned barn-storming Shakespeare." Lloyd Dykk, a meticulous old-school critic at the Vancouver Sun, praised its public-hearted spirit: "You are essentially outside in beautiful weather and enough of what makes this play great can usually be counted upon to come through."

But challenges came immediately. The next weekend, the Symphony of Fire ran its pyrotechnics show in Vanier Park. Word had spread, and thousands arrived early to secure good viewing spots. Bright blue porta-potties sat conspicuously on the grounds.

Festival-goers began sneaking into the theatre tent to use the bathrooms during performances. Gaze stopped one patron and struck a deal: use a loo if you buy something from concession. It worked. Suddenly Mr. Big chocolate bars and red licorice flew off the shelves. "We made a fortune," Gaze wrote later, "or at least enough to have the loos pumped out more regularly."

The operation ran lean. One actor, Scott Bellis, worked the bar alongside his rehearsals—unusual for a theatre company where actors typically stay backstage. Gaze himself joked he "drank heavily to sponsor" a money-losing bar.

Night after night, Gaze paced the empty stage before performances, watching seats fill. The first crowd was small, but each night more chairs were occupied. By opening weekend's final night, he had nearly a full house.

Lying in his VW Vanagon afterward, exhausted, Gaze remembered words from Douglas Campbell, his mentor: "You are going to do something."

"And how complex, how joyous, how frustrating, how wonderfully and terribly challenging it all had been," Gaze wrote decades later in his new memoir, *The Road to Bard*. "I jumped down and walked slowly up the aisle. Outside, I secured the flap. All was quiet as I patrolled the site, working my way around to the backstage area... God, I was tired. At any rate, I instantly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep."

Gaze had come to Vancouver in the late 1970s on the encouragement of Campbell, a pioneering Canadian theatre director who himself had studied under Sir Tyrone Guthrie at Stratford. Gaze was a professional actor of seventeen years when he decided the time was right to build what he'd seen work: an outdoor summer Shakespeare festival in a tent.

He wanted to share Shakespeare in what he called "an idyllic spot—Vancouver's Vanier Park, with its spectacular backdrop of mountains, sea and sky." He wanted audiences to experience the Bard in fresh air, in community, with the city as the stage's backdrop.

The vision stuck. Bard on the Beach became Western Canada's largest not-for-profit professional Shakespeare festival. Hundreds of thousands have sat in those tents over the decades. The festival became a summer institution—so reliable that Vancouverites know summer has arrived when the tents go up on the seawall.

Gaze reflects in his memoir that Shakespeare's own words capture the essence of what he built: "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." For Gaze, that tide came in 1990. He saw an opportunity to create something that had moved him as an actor—a shared experience of Shakespeare under open sky, in a place where mountains and ocean frame the human drama onstage.

Harold Bloom, the Shakespearean scholar, once wrote: "There is the Bible, there is Shakespeare and then there is everybody else." Gaze had internalized that hierarchy as a young reader. Poetry and language shaped him. He wanted to share that shaping with anyone who would listen.

Thirty-six summers later, Bard on the Beach remains proof that a single person's vision—combined with community labor, family sacrifice, and a willingness to solve problems on the fly—can become a cornerstone of a city's culture.

For Gaze, the dream was always simple: give people a chance to sit under the stars and be moved by words written four centuries ago. Everything else—the logistics, the financing, the nights sleeping in a camper—followed from that.

When the tent flaps come down each October, Vancouverites know autumn has arrived. But when they go up again each spring, the city remembers that summer is a season for magic, for words, for gathering together in the presence of genius.