The Bard's King Fred

• "He's a very special man," says Donna Law, the festival's director of marketing and public relations. "He makes me crazy sometimes, but he's so passionate about what we do."

• "He's my hero," says opera singer Michael Ballam, head of Utah State University's music department. "He's got more energy and vision in one finger than the rest of us have in our entire body. I'm in awe of him. I'd like to grow up to be Fred Adams. Think about what he's done."

This is what he has done. Forty-four years ago, the mining industry in Cedar City was being killed by foreign competition, and people were moving out. If that wasn't enough, there was a proposal to build the new I-15 freeway 15 miles west of town where land was cheaper. City leaders were desperate to find a way to attract people and dollars to Cedar City.

Adams appeared in front of the City Council and the Chamber of Commerce and told them he had the solution: Build a Shakespearean theater that would attract visitors looking for something to do at night after they had visited the many national parks in the area. Their reaction was predictable. He heard snickering as he left the room.

"It went over like a pregnant pole vaulter," Adams likes to say. "They thought it was a dumb idea. Really dumb."

He went around town looking for money to start the festival and struck out everywhere until the Lions Club agreed to underwrite his plan with $1,000 after he told them he expected to recover all of the money in ticket sales. He brought in $3,000 that season in 1961, and the festival has become, for Cedar City, exactly what Adams said it would be.

Many of the festival's patrons return each year, traveling from the cultural centers of the world to the sagebrush country of southern Utah.

Adelman, a longtime theater buff, and his family started coming to the festival 16 years ago after hearing about it from a relative who lives in Utah. They come annually and bring 50 or 60 of their friends with them, including, over the years, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

"Now we have people from Buffalo, Washington, Chicago and San Diego who come to the festival," says Adelman. "Friends invite their friends, and once they come, they stay. It does not look like the kind of place that would attract first-rate theater. Then you go and find that the shows are fabulous."

How did Adams know Shakespeare would sell to a town of ranchers and miners? Adams tells this story: After being lured away from New York to Southern Utah State College to start a theater program, he produced a season of theater that consisted of three productions — a musical, a play and Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew." Shakespeare packed the house; the other productions drew maybe 50 people. Adams was puzzled until he did some research.