"I started looking at the community," he says. "They were far away from any metropolitan influence. There was no TV. They made their own theater and culture. They had a symphony that's older than the Utah Symphony. They had produced the entire Messiah for half a century. They had a juried international art exhibit. They produced more grand opera in Cedar than in Salt Lake. I thought, that's what these people want. They don't want Broadway fluff. They want meaty stuff. They want Shakespeare.

"The earliest wagon train in Cedar produced Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice' a week after arriving here, while they were living in wagons. They came from these civilized lands where theater was important."

At the outset, Adams and his wife Barbara climbed into a car and set out to visit Shakespeare festivals in Oregon, Canada and Connecticut, where Adams observed and interviewed their founders, making detailed notes. He ended the interviews with the same question: "If you had to do it over again, what one thing would you do and what one thing would you not do?"

It took years to attract actors, directors, designers and reviewers. One of the latter was Harold Lundstrom, the Deseret News' theater critic who had a passion for Shakespeare. He traveled to Cedar at his own expense and reviewed the festival.

"It opened the floodgates of Salt Lake City," says Adams. "We still wouldn't be anything if not for Harold. And he knew his Shakespeare."

Since the early days, the festival has grown into a massive undertaking. Each season, festival officials hire 350 employees, only 50 of whom are actors. They are mostly seamstresses, carpenters, painters, dancers, designers, box office staff, child-care workers, management, housing staff. They own 96 apartments in which they house many of their employees, and they house the others in apartments around town, which means they own furniture and bed linens for all of them.

If there is some detail Adams has overlooked, nobody can think of it. They offer an orientation on the play audiences are about to see. The festival provides child care for theater patrons.

In addition to doing six plays during the summer season, they do three more in the fall, then a Christmas season. After that, they take a reduced Shakespeare play on the road for three months, performing for some 65 high schools and 85,000 high school students around the Mountain West. In the summer, they do workshops, camps, seminars and backstage tours. In the winter, they visit grade schools to teach students and teachers how to do Shakespeare, and eventually they select schools to perform their productions in Cedar City.