Freewill Shakespeare Festival: Plays for a Midsummer Night

Freewill Shakespeare Festival presents Hamlet and Comedy of Errors. Free Will Players has produced 29 seasons of Shakespeare in the Park, consisting of 49 full-length productions, all remarkably set in the Heritage Amphitheatre in Edmonton’s Hawrelak Park. Evening shows start at 8pm, Sat. and Sun. Mat. 2pm Tickets are $22.63 students and seniors, $32.63 for adults, $52.63 for a Festival Pass (see both shows), and $202.63 for a VIP Pass (Unlimited Performances, drink and a snack for two). Comedy of Errors – Egeon, from Syracuse, is arrested and condemned to death for illegally entering Ephesus. Brought before Duke Solinus, Egeon tells the tale of his misfortune: he was shipwrecked many years ago while sailing with his wife, Emilia, and two pairs of identical twins—their twin sons, both named Antipholus, and twin servants, both named Dromio. In the course of the storm, his wife, one of their sons, and one their servants, were lost. Solinus, moved by the old man’s tale, postpones Egeon’s sentence until nightfall. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, has returned home to Elsinore from school in Wittenberg to mourn the death of his father, King Hamlet. Hamlet is shaken to his core when his newly widowed mother, Queen Gertrude, marries his father’s brother Claudius, who becomes the new king. A ghost appears to guards on nightly watch, and to Hamlet’s good friend, Horatio, who thinks the spirit looks like Hamlet’s father. Horatio convinces Hamlet to keep watch with them again. The ghost appears, reveals himself to Hamlet and tells him that his brother Claudius poisoned him. Hamlet vows to avenge his father’s murder.