"En Garde!"
William Penn

Musical excerpts from William Penn's various scores for the Wisconsin Shakespeare Festival, USA.

The WSF Story

The twenty-one history of the Wisconsin Shakespeare Festival at Plattleville proves the heart-felt conviction of its founding directions: that Shakespeare is still a living dramatist whose appeal spans all ages and all walks of life. The WSF was the dream-child of Thomas P. Collins, costume designer Wendy W. Collins, and technical director Thomas S. Goltry. The goal was to produce an annual summer season of Shakespearean and other classical drama with a nationally recruited company of non-Equity actors and technicians on the UW-Platteville campus.

Audiences endured suffocating heat and humidity for the first season (1977) in the old Doudna Little Theatre as they thrilled to Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and As You Like It, performed on an authentic-looking Elizabethan stage setting. In 1983 the WSF moved into the beautiful air-conditioned Center for the Arts, and has since grown and prospered. As of 1997, the Festival has staged 28 of the Bard's 37 canonical plays, many of them several times and in a variety of production styles.

William Penn's music has played a vital role in creating the historical period and varying moods for the WSF's productions since 1980, when he was asked to compose a score for Collins' production of Measure for Measure. It has been an exciting and fruitful collaboration. Penn's versatility in style, coupled with his keen sense of theatricality, has been a major asset. He captures the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, the exoticism of the Middle East, the heroism of ancient Rome, or the romanticism of the 19th Century within just a few bars of his endlessly inventive scores. "Where did you find that marvelous music," the entranced patrons ask. Now they may relive the magical moments of the WSF experience in this collection of highlights from Penn's scores.

--Notes by Thomas P. Collins, WSF Artistic Director