This is a posting about our stay at the Iron Gate Inn in Cedar City, Utah while we enjoyed a weekend at the Utah Shakespearean Festival.
CEDAR CITY, UTAH (July 27, 2008) – There’s nothing better than making new friends. Susan and CR Wooten are the latest.
Susan and CR own this inviting bed and breakfast, the Iron Gate Inn which is also known as The 1897 Iron Gate.
My wife Teri and I, along with our friends Frank and Gerri Tussing, spent a delightful, intellectually stimulating, and relaxing weekend with Susan and CR as we saw four plays at the Utah Shakespearean Festival.
The Iron Gate has seven rooms, a guest cottage, and a carriage house. All together they can take 26 people at one time. The grounds resemble an English garden; so much so that locals have weddings, receptions, and baby showers here.
The rooms are tastefully decorated with various Americana. The house’s structure, though originally built in 1897, has been renovated. All the amenities are there – even wireless. The only thing missing from the rooms is television which is typical in most B&Bs. You can even bring a small dog to stay in the cottage. (Check with them ahead of time.)
What sets The Iron Gate apart is Susan and CR. Guys, there’s good news and bad news: Susan’s very attractive; CR’s a big man who worked construction. But that’s not it. And it’s not the fact that she is an interior designer that makes the house so inviting. And it’s not CR’s construction background that makes the house so livable. No, it’s simply them.
“We like to interact with our customers,” Susan told us. They spent time between shows with us offering us wine and snacks. We even spent a late Saturday night discussing everything from Shakespeare to living in Las Vegas, which they did for ten years. They did this with all their guests this weekend. “We get to know what our customers really like,” she explains.
We saw it first hand. A restaurant lost our reservation for dinner. Susan was on the phone to the restaurant, using her contacts from the past six years to make sure we got the reservation and would be on time for the show.
When Susan found out Teri didn’t like bananas, which would be the foundation for one of her great breakfasts, she made Teri a special eggs, cheese, and spinach dish. It was waiting for Teri in the morning.
That’s the only thing she Susan requests of her guests: “If you got something you can’t eat, tell me ahead of time.” She wants to avoid any food allergies.
Don’t think they’re intrusive, though. As Gerri says, she and Frank always go back because of the combination of “privacy and sociability. We never feel like we’re intruding on them.” And vice versa.
There’s a delicate balance here Susan and CR seem to have found. It’s a difficult task to make someone feel your home is their home while also making them feel like special guests. So if you enjoy the B&B owner you only see for breakfasts or to drop off the key, then this could be a place for you as well.
Susan told us about one of their first guests – a newly married couple. They made “themselves at home’ by coming down to breakfast in their pajamas, but besides that, they stayed in their honeymoon room and “we didn’t see too much of them,” Susan explained.
Cedar City is not a hotbed of nightlife. Sure, there are bars; it’s not entirely dry in this Mormon town. But if you’re looking for an all-out party, you’ll have a hard time finding it here.
This is a place to getaway from it all. Susan directed us to an incredible hiking trail that meandered along some rivers and water falls while we saw some of those salmon-colored mountains. After a good hike, there is plenty to enjoy around the Shakespeare festival and with the addition of some decent restaurants. The two we enjoyed were: Milt’s Ranch House, a ten minute drive on the highway; and The Garden House which is walking distance from The Iron Gate.
Besides their website, Susan and CR do little advertising. Word of mouth works best. That’s how we got here. Frank and Gerri have stayed there three other times, so we didn’t question their choice.
And that’s the way Susan and CR like it. She told me the only thing more exciting than meeting new people is knowing their previous customers are returning.
Enjoy some time with them. I highly recommend it. As I write this, we’re planning a September weekend with Gaius Julius Caesar, Marc Anthony, Brutus and the gang, and of course, Susan and CR.
Disclosure here: I have no financial agreement with CR and Susan.
This is a posting about a weekend in Cedar City, Utah attending the Utah Shakespearean Festival at Southern Utah University. I highly recommend you take some time there during remainder of the summer and into the fall. I also recommend a stay at the Iron Gate Inn which you can read about in an earlier post.
CEDAR CITY, UTAH (July 27, 2008) – This is one of Las Vegans favorite escapes. We drive north on I-15 where it’s a little cooler, the mountains are shaded salmon, and we think we’ve landed in Mayberry western style.
But instead of Andy and Opie, we have The Bard. The center of Cedar City is Southern Utah University, a lovely little campus. But the center of SUU is the Utah Shakespearean Festival, founded by Fred Adams, who, in 1961 as the school’s theater professor, saw the flood of summer tourists with little or nothing to do.
Today his vision has been immortalized with a bronze statue on campus. Knowing Fred since 1990, I knew what a hallowed event monument this would be for him. “My ass is not that big,” he shouted to me in a recent interview. I didn’t check.
But Fred’s image, his vision, his passion, and, needless to say, his sense of humor are all much bigger, at least figuratively, than his bronzed backside.
Yes, the Utah Shakespearean Festival has been around now for more than 40 years. Sure, they won a regional Tony Award in 2000. But what amazes me is this. Las Vegas, the cauldron of gaudiness, lacking any intellectual threads, is a major source of support for the festival. I’m amazed at each visit the amount of people I meet from Las Vegas. And we’re not talking the upper income earners; no it’s usually working class folks with their kids.
That’s because Fred and the festival staff have made Shakespeare fun and relevant. In September and October, the festival will perform Julius Caesar in a 2008 setting. It’s no coincidence, Fred tells me, that Caesar will run only months and weeks before the election.
Fred’s pre-performance talks are a delight. If you’re new to Shakespeare take in Fred’s words and then you can relax and enjoy the performance.
Another change to the festival over the past ten years was offering non-Shakespeare plays; for instance, this year audiences saw the musical Fiddler on the Roof, the Nineteenth Century classic Cyrano de Bergerac, and Moliere’s The School for Wives.
This is my first trip here in a number of years. While I was a news anchor in Las Vegas from 1990 to 1996, I not only attended the festival and saw every play, but I also brought up a camera crew and produced a 30-minute show. The bulk of those shows were lively and fascinating interviews with Fred – though kept for posterity in my mind, not necessarily for his previously mentioned posterior.
Frankly, I’m kicking myself from being away so long. National TV shows and other ventures were the causes of my absence for those years — but no more.
Our good friends/clients Frank Gerri Tussing joined us for three days, two nights, and four shows.
The four shows we saw were: Two Gentleman from Verona; Othello; Cyrano de Bergerac; and Fiddler on the Roof. The four of us recommend them all.
My favorite, to my surprise, was Fiddler. Usually, I gravitate – or fixate – on the tragedies. (English major!) But this musical performance was near flawless. Every actor held their role, as I put it, to completion. I didn’t have to suspend belief and I was moved. That says a lot when you consider they break out in song and dance. Sure, the live orchestra helped too.
That’s not to say the other shows – Othello, Cyrano, and Two Gentleman – lacked good performances; to the contrary.
Brian Vaughn was brilliant as Cyrano and as Lance, the servant in Two Gentleman. He was witty and poignant, stealing roles whether as a principle or ancillary. Over the years, I rate Brian as one of my top five favorite performers here.
Jonathan Earl Peck, who played Othello, was spell-binding. He captured the subtle metamorphosis of content husband to deranged and influenced jealous lover. My first live performance of Othello was with James Earl Jones more than 25 years ago. Peck’s performance rates with it. Like any great performance of Othello, Macbeth, or Hamlet, the audience needs to loath yet suffer with these main characters. Peck’s performance made you want to go up on stage and say, “Dude, what are you thinking?”
His counterpart, James Newcomb, who played the evil Iago was equally captivating, so much so you wanted to strangle him yourself.
These three, along with many others, are experienced actors from stage and screen. Along with the Directors, they give the Utah Shakespearean Festival, to quote Cyrano, all the panache of Broadway.
There are also some young well-trained performers who are just cutting their teeth. These young thespians know their lines, but, at times, lack the experience and miss moments that fulfill the true essence of a character or, at times, their youth fails to interpret gestures or actions that will give the audience new meaning. Doing this is not easy. Their inexperience, however, takes nothing away from their performances. In fact, for the seasoned theater-goer, watching these up-and-comers search and struggle for their acting identities is an added intrigue to the experience.
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