Why This Fall's Romeo and Juliet in Montford Comes With Vampires

Walk up Gay Street this week and you'll find folding chairs already staked out on the terraced hillside behind the Montford Community Center, hours before curtain. Right now, through August 29, that hill belongs to "The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel," a new take on Baroness Orczy's swashbuckling stories written by local playwright Audrey Kopp. Coolers are open. Someone's kid is running laps around the sound booth. It's the kind of Friday night Montford has been having for more than fifty years.

What most people watching don't know is that come September, the Montford Park Players are turning "Romeo and Juliet" into a vampire story. The Capulets become vampire hunters. The Montagues become the vampires. The Shakespearean text stays intact. The concept does not.

That's not a marketing stunt dressed up as art. It's closer to a forecast, and understanding why tells you something real about how this neighborhood's most durable institution actually works.

The vampires are a hedge, not a gimmick

Ask Montford Park Players artistic director Jason Williams which shows fill the hill and which ones don't, and the answer is blunt: comedies win. A popular comedy like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" regularly draws 200 to 300 people a night, sometimes climbing into the 400s, with chairs covering the terraces and crowds spilling onto the lawn. A tragedy, even a great one like "King Lear," tends to land closer to 150. Williams put it plainly when a local news crew asked why: "You gotta be, like, a serious Shakespeare buff, or just a glutton for punishment to come see tragedies."

That gap between 150 and 400 matters more here than it would at a ticketed theater, because there's no box office setting the incentives straight. This is donation-supported theater. What people give at intermission is the actual operating revenue. So when a company that runs entirely on suggested $10 to $15 donations schedules a tragedy, it's making a bet on turnout the same way any theater would, just with the numbers showing up as a hat passed around instead of a ticket sold in advance.

Which is exactly why "Romeo and Juliet" arrives this September with fangs. Director Kristi DeVille, who has led Montford Park Players productions for years, pitched the vampire concept and Williams, by his own admission, isn't usually the one pushing for a wild reinterpretation of a classic. He went along with it because the logic tracks: keep the tragedy's emotional weight, but give it the hook a straight tragedy doesn't have on its own.

What the history season actually taught them

The clearest evidence for this comes from the season the company almost didn't recover from, and it's not the season most people assume.

Before Tropical Storm Helene hit Western North Carolina in September 2024, Montford Park Players had committed to something Williams says no other theater company is known to have attempted: a full cycle of Shakespeare's history plays in a single season. "Edward III," both parts of "Henry IV," "Henry V," all three parts of "Henry VI," "Richard II," and "Richard III," staged back to back over one summer. It was an ambitious, unprecedented undertaking for a volunteer-run outdoor theater.

Attendance dropped. Helene arrived late in the run and put a damper on the final show, "Richard III," which makes it tempting to blame the storm for a rough year. Williams doesn't. "Our history season was a little blip in the radar, because, turns out, not as many people are interested in the history plays," he said. The storm made a hard season worse at the very end, but the softer turnout had already set in before Helene ever touched Asheville. People didn't come out for eight straight history plays the way they come out for a comedy they already know.

The following summer proved the point in reverse. With crowd favorites like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" back on the schedule, attendance returned to its usual highs almost immediately. The company didn't need a recovery campaign. It needed a season people wanted to see.

That's the pattern behind this year's lineup too.

Every show on that list is either an established audience favorite or a tragedy dressed up enough to compete with one. That's not accidental programming. It's fifty years of paying attention to what the hat collects.

Free theater still runs on real math

None of this is possible without an unusual amount of unpaid labor. Montford Park Players is North Carolina's longest-running Shakespeare festival, and it has never charged admission in its outdoor season. In a typical year, roughly two hundred people donate their time as actors, stage crew, and technicians to make that happen. The organization is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and its funding comes from audience donations at intermission, playbill advertising, and contributions from local businesses and patrons, not from a subscription model or a box office window.

That structure is why the genre calculus matters so much. A theater selling tickets in advance can lock in revenue regardless of what critics or word of mouth say later. A theater passing a hat after the show finds out in real time whether the audience thought it was worth $10. Fifty-plus years of doing this in the same Montford park has turned that feedback loop into institutional knowledge, which is how you end up with vampire Montagues.

What to actually bring if you're going

The amphitheater itself hasn't changed much in decades, and the rules of attending it are almost a neighborhood ritual by now.

• There's no covered seating anywhere on the hill, so an umbrella or poncho earns its keep on unpredictable summer and fall evenings. The company only cancels for genuine downpours.
• Outside food and drinks, including alcohol, are allowed. Bring the picnic and the cooler.
• Chair rentals run roughly $8 to $10 if you'd rather not haul your own up the hill.
• Concessions sell salty and sweet snacks along with beer and wine, and guest vendors like The Hop show up through the season for something sweeter.
• Parking is free in the lots just outside the amphitheater, and the venue sits inside the Montford Community Center Complex at 92 Gay Street, an easy pull off I-240 or I-26.

Why this is worth knowing if you already live here

None of this changes what the show is about on a Friday night: kids on the lawn, a hat going around, a director trying something strange with a five-hundred-year-old play. But knowing that the whole operation runs on turnout rather than ticket sales changes how you read a season schedule. When Montford Park Players hands you a comedy in July and a monster-movie version of a tragedy in September, that's not a coincidence of scheduling. It's a fifty-year-old institution reading its own neighborhood correctly, one donation at a time.

If you're the kind of Montford resident who already has a favorite spot on that hill, this fall's lineup is worth the walk. If you're newer to the neighborhood and still figuring out where the community actually gathers, the amphitheater on Gay Street is as good an answer as any.

For everything else about calling Montford or the rest of Asheville home, from what a specific block is actually like to what your search should look like when you're ready to start it, Aaron Chapman and the team are a call away. If you're curious what your own place in the neighborhood is worth these days, Get a Free Home Valuation and find out where you stand.