Well, he does acknowledge one surprise. In 2000, the festival was awarded a Tony as the nation's Outstanding Regional Theater. Over the years, the festival has been praised by national media — Newsweek, Look, Sunset, Time, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the BBC.

Adams and his friends don't just put on Shakespeare every year in Cedar City, they knock it dead. While working on a documentary about the history of theater, the Royal Shakespeare Company flew its cast and crew from England to Cedar City in 1981 to spend two weeks filming a BBC sequence that covered Elizabethan drama and William Shakespeare. They filmed it in the festival's theater because they considered it the closest replica in the world to what Shakespeare might have performed his plays in originally (before Shakespeare's Globe Theater was rebuilt).

Once, when Adams and several of his festival patrons were taking a backstage tour of the Royal Shakespeare Company's theater in Stratford-on-Avon, they overheard one of the other guests ask a tour guide, "Where would you go to see Shakespeare in America?" The tour guide replied, "If you want to see Shakespeare the way he would have done it, go to the Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City, Utah."

Representatives from design institutes have flown across the country to Cedar City to study the festival's costumes because of their remarkable authenticity.

The man who is responsible for this is of course Adams, the founder and director and a man who is widely admired. Check his reviews:

• "He's a creator in the greatest sense of the term," says Ken Adelman, former security adviser to President Reagan and now a consultant in Washington. "He made the festival from nothing. Mike Peters (the syndicated cartoonist) called Fred 'pure light.' It's his joy of life and people."

• "He is an institution all by himself," says U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett. "It shows what can happen when someone pursues a goal with absolute single-mindedness. Many times, the true mark of genius is the ability to see what others can't."

• "He's really a visionary," says Ivan Lincoln, the Deseret Morning News' longtime theater critic. "What he's done in Cedar City is amazing. It's his baby."

• "His passion and energy instill passion and energy in others," says Phillips, who changed his major from business to theater after taking one of Adams' theater classes at Southern Utah University. "Fred will never retire. We say we're going to bronze him and stuff him and animate him like 'Great Moments of Mr. Lincoln.' He believes people are good and that they will look for beautiful things that will uplift them."