This summer has been a transitional challenge for Woodward Shakespeare Festival, no question about it. Though the move from the park's amphitheater to the smaller group activity area gave lots of room for positive spin -- the intimacy of the space, the additional greenery, the potential for a permanent stage -- festival organizers had some big challenges as well, especially the lighting situation. As the second production of the summer, "Hamlet," gears up for an Aug. 14 opening, spokesperson Chris Campbell looks back at "Twelfth Night," addresses what's up with the lights and talks about "Hamlet":

Well, 12th Night is concluded. I think the show really strengthened in all aspects over the 5 week run as we learned a lot -- and monitored the feed back on your blog. I don't know if you were able to get back out there but we have heard excellent things from the audience and we had over 1500 total audience for the three shows last weekend.

Now we are on to Hamlet opening August 14. We are on the way to transform the set into a Danish Castle and rehearsals seem to be going very well.

There are two things I want to emphasize about Hamlet: the interesting director and the less interesting lights.

Our director for this is Arlene Schulman. She and her husband both have many, many years of experience in theater in the New York/New Jersey area. She has recently gone back to school and is finishing up her masters degree in Shakespeare at Stratford. She saw our advertisement for directors for Hamlet and applied because she was working on the interpretation of the women of Hamlet. We were fascinated and we believe we were very lucky to engage her.

On the lights, I am finding out that Woodward Park has an excellent irrigation system and little else in the way of infrastructure. It turns out that they do not have enough power available in the park to run a 48 channel dimmer--or even a 24 as the only place there is really big power is the amphitheater and that is spoken for. We have neither the time nor the money for this season to bring in additional power from the main line along Friant Road. So we will be improvising. Once we got additional light on 12th Night to solve the dimness I think the minimal lights on worked fine enough for that play but I want to do more for Hamlet. Unfortunately, there is not too much more I can do with six circuits plugged in by extension cords running through the grass to distant outlets. Hopefully a meeting planned this week with the electrical folks will come up with some little bit of help but it will remain a creative challenge to use what little we have available to best advantage.

I think it's helpful for the community to know the technical background here. I hope the park can find a way to deliver more juice to Shakespeare.