25th St. Louis Shakespeare Festival Features Theatre Alums and Faculty This Summer
This year, for its 25th anniversary, the free, annual St. Louis Shakespeare Festival in Forest Park will stage Hamlet, directed by and starring several Columbia theatre-makers. The festival runs from May 28 to June 22, 2025, and expects to draw crowds of 40,000 over the course of the production.
Hamlet’s director and Shakespeare aficionado, Adjunct Assistant Professor Michael Sexton, reimagined the Danish play in mid-century Manhattan, preoccupied with political and financial power. Sexton took advantage of a new stage extension that allowed attendees to surround a catwalk, creating intimacy between the performers and audience. In New York, Sexton is the Director of the Public Shakespeare Initiative at The Public Theater.
The play stars Acting alums Michael Khalid Karadsheh ’22 in the title role and Sarah Chalfie ’24 as tragic Ophelia.
In critic James Lindhorst’s review for Broadway World, he said of the period piece, “The actors, donned in Oana Botez's vintage cocktail dress inspired costumes, open the first scene in what looks like an office party straight out of an episode of Matthew Weiner’s period drama Mad Men.”
In his review for HEC Media, a St. Louis nonprofit, critic Gerry Kowarsky said, “The entire cast must be praised for the uniform beauty and understanding with which Shakespeare’s language is spoken.”
Kowarsky praises Karadsheh’s performance as highly attentive to detail, personal and communicative. Chalfie, meanwhile, plays a self-possessed Ophelia. Kowarsky said, “Even in her madness, Chalfie’s Ophelia is assertive. She lashes out instead of languishing.”
The festival also features a tour of A Midsummer’s Night Dream in parks across the metro and a puppet show inside the Saint Louis Zoo, Romeo & Zooliet, featuring a prairie dog and a grizzly bear playing the doomed couple.
Michael Sexton has worked as a dramaturg and a director for many Shakespeare productions and new plays, including Macbeth with Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga at Longacre Theatre, King Lear at Broadway’s Cort Theatre, Hamlet at The Public Theater and Othello at New York Theater Workshop. He is the Director of the Public Shakespeare Initiative at The Public Theater and was the Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Society from 2005 to 2017. Other than Columbia, he has taught at NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, UNC Chapel Hill and the Taconic Correctional Facility. He was born in Brooklyn.
Michael Khalid Karadsheh has acted in the TV series Everything’s Trash by 2 Dope Queens’ Phoebe Robinson as well as the Off-Broadway shows We Live in Cairo and The Ally.
Sarah Chalfie has performed in the plays Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Hartford Stage; The Rose Tattoo, Off the Main Road and Snore at the Williamstown Theatre Festival; and FillFillFillFillFillFillFill at The Flea.