"We sang inane songs in the cabin and drank fruit juice that goes right through you," he recalls. "I was depressed. All I could think about was that we had to walk back. Later, as we were walking back, I lingered behind. I hated it. I hated being a missionary and being cold. I was kicking at frozen clumps of snow and mud when suddenly a little girl in front yelled, 'Look up!' It was the Northern Lights. It was the first time I had seen them. They were shimmering curtains of green, blue, pink and gold. It was so magical. You could actually hear it zing. The static electricity made the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It was that close. You could almost touch it. It was a miracle. Long after the light danced away from us, I looked at this sky of black velvet that was studded in stars so big you thought you could get on a ledge and touch them.

"I was transfixed by this miracle. I have thought of it many times. What if that girl had not cried, 'Look up!' I discovered that I was there to call people to look up. And that's why I do Shakespeare. And if you don't look up, you miss all these miracles. Whatever it is — a painting or a sunset — if you don't look up, you're going to miss a miracle that won't be repeated. I like affording people an opportunity to see and enjoy great theater. I am a devoted fan of history, of culture, of opera, ballet, symphony, painting, even buildings. I just walked through the Salt Lake library. I was blown away by beauty. I couldn't believe it. It's magnificent! The glass and the curves and the heights. Dang! It was mind-affirming that man can think that well and do that well with glass and rock and steel."

After taking a master's degree in theater at BYU, Adams went to New York City as an aspiring Broadway director. To pay the bills, he got a job as a swing dancer on Broadway.

"I was on call, but thankfully no one ever called," he says. "I would have made an ass of myself."

He didn't like New York, but he was networking, trying to make connections that would give him a career as a director. "But it wasn't the lifestyle for me," he says. "I didn't like New York. I was a small-town boy."

Royden Braithwaite, the president of Southern Utah State College, as it was called then, saved him. He flew to New York and recruited Adams to start a theater program at his school. Adams started without a single prop in 1959 and has been there ever since. Two years later he started the festival.

"We were so dumb, we wouldn't have known we were in trouble," says Adams. "It was never smooth sailing. You don't build world-class theater in rural southern Utah easily. It took years to get it going."

Adams still reads Shakespeare regularly. (He selects the plays that will be produced at the festival each year.) His life-long passion for the Bard has never waned.

"What's made Shakespeare what he is?" Adams asks. "Because he knew 400 years ago how Fred Adams felt, how he thought, how he operates. He understood an 80-year-old king with three daughters, and a 14-year-old-girl in love, and a military man who wants to be king. I never read the same Hamlet twice. Or Lear. I read it when I was a student in high school, then when I was a college kid, and it was a totally different play. Then I read it when I got married, and it was different again. Then I read it when I had children and it was different. And now I read it when I have grandkids, and it's a different play. I'll be reading, and it's like, 'When did he say that?' "

Adams is still looking up, still looking for beauty and a miracle wherever he can find it.

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E-mail: drob@desnews.com