Over on Fresnocentric, blogger Solitaire reports that once again the Woodward Shakespeare Festival is getting beat up by the city. Last weekend, the cast and crew gathered to build this season's set at its new location in the park and learned that the theater company needed a building permit (even though they've built the same set for three years now and apparently never needed one before.) So a whole volunteer work day was lost. On top of that, to compound the bureaucratic irritation, it turns out that just like last year, there's a conflict with performance dates. Solitaire writes:

The City decided to double book the space we were relocated to and have informed us that our OPENING WEEKEND Saturday is cancelled. Now, to set the record straight, we have NO problem setting aside our show for a charity event to benefit children’s illnesses, that is not the issue here. The issue is the fact that the Events Calendar Coordinator (if there even is such a person) forgot to plug in OUR dates when we submitted them MONTHS ago and so there wasn’t anything on the calendar about us until it was already too late.

If you recall from earlier Beehive grumblings, something similar happened not once but TWICE last year.

Taken separately, the building-permit thing and the botched scheduling might not seem much, but taken together it's part of a pattern. I for one think that the city's parks department should be bowing and scraping to the needs and desires of the Woodward Shakespeare Festival -- an organization that provides FREE Shakespeare for local audiences and is attempting to build a cultural brand for this city. Perhaps it's time to get serious: to call out those in the parks department who specifically are not making Shakespeare a priority. This company has proven that it is much more than a "let's put on a show" casual operation that can have its performance dates pulled at a whim. Can you imagine if the Ashland Shakespeare Festival had been treated this way in its early stages by its minor city bureaucrats? These people at the parks department work for US. And they'd better not forget it.