Dear All:

Now that our season is finally over — including our quickest ever strike (I picked trash and screws out of the gravel backstage for two hours yesterday while Bob and Mark shoved the last of the heavy things into the trailers) — with the cloud-capped towers and solemn temples all dissolved, I wanted to thank you all for being part of our extraordinary 20th season celebration, a season we will always remember as our “summer of love.”

The summer culminated Saturday with a gorgeous and heartfelt wedding ceremony for the new Mr. and Mrs. William Elsman, complete with prayers of thankfulness, heaps of gratitude for both sets of parents, sage and magic rocks, tears and laughter, and of course some rock-and-roll drumming.  As Bill might have said, these guys really hit it out of the park.  Indeed!  Bill and Alex were beat to the punch by Barry and Jessica, who tied the knot — at Trader Joe’s ! — the week before.  (Imagine how happy my inner yenta is to have had a hand in bringing both of these couples together.)  I never heard Orsino say “here is my hand” or Caesar refer to “my wife” (knowing he’d rehearsed the scene often with Jessica) without thinking of the masses of true love swirling about Forest Meadows like the worst of the wind.

Each of the productions was superb.  Each of you were a joy to work with.  Amazingly (in this economy) our audiences were up by a whopping 12% over last summer, and were 6% higher than our previous high water mark.  Almost 11,000 people attended the shows this summer.

Everyone is asking what we’ll be doing next summer.  It’s difficult for us to decide quite yet, because we are still so in love with this summer we don’t quite want to let it go and move on to the next year’s projects.  But as the memories linger on, we’re also considering many options for next year.  We’d like to try to replicate the joy, the fun, the excitement, and the high quality of this year’s productions.  We’ll be trying to figure out how to do that, hoping that many of you will be back to play and work with us again next year.  (Bob is open to suggestions — but he’ll be traveling off-road through Baja for the next three weeks, deeply meditating (when sober) on how to create another power-house season, I’m sure.)  Expect an official announcement sometime in November.

Meanwhile, please share our pride in an amazing season.  Please share our gratitude for the opportunity to create with such talented, funny, sexy, honest, smart, hard-working and dedicated colleagues.

Thanks, thanks, and ever thanks.  The weather still continues charming.  And let slip the dogs of…something…

(imagine confetti cannons here and your favorite beatles tune)

Peace and love,

Lesley (and Bob)