121. Georgia Shakespeare Festival
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (404) 264-0020
Address: 4484 Peachtree Rd. NE
Description: This festival has seen its annual attendance more than double since its inaugural season in 1985. Performances are held on the campus of Oglethorpe University, whose Gothic architecture affords a fine setting for productions of Shakespeare. Originally staged in a tent, the festival now has its own $5.7 million theater. The feel of the open-air tent has been retained through the use of roll-up walls for when the evenings are pleasant. But for those typical Georgia nights rich with humidity and occasional thunderstorms, the walls will stay in place and air-conditioning will keep actors and audience blissfully comfortable. An evening at the festival begins at 6:30 p.m. when the grounds open for picnicking. At 7 p.m. there’s cabaret-style entertainment. Performances begin at 8 p.m.
122. Horizon Theatre Company
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (404) 584-7450
Address: 1083 Austin Ave. NE
Description: Lisa and Jeff Adler have operated Horizon since 1983 out of an intimate, 185-seat theater in a rehabilitated school building at the intersection of Euclid and Austin Avenues in Little Five Points. The professional nonprofit company’s productions range from satire to drama with a special emphasis on new plays and playwrights. In addition to four mainstage productions annually, Horizon develops new writers through its New Horizons readings and cultivates new theater-lovers through its Teen Ensemble and Senior Citizens Ensemble acting and playwriting programs. Past productions included Abducting Hillary by Dario Fo, The Drawer Boy by Michael Healey, Time Flies by David Ives, and The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife by Charles Busch.
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Address: 5342 Tilly Mill Rd.
124. The New American Shakespeare Tavern
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (404) 874-5299
Address: 499 Peachtree St. NE
Description: Four blocks south of the Fox Theatre, this company produces the plays of Shakespeare and other classical authors. Although the setting is casual with chairs and tables for 200 arranged on a three-tiered system. The productions are traditional—no need to worry that you’ll find King Lear pushing a shopping cart through a post-nuclear slum. The company produces the tragedies as well as the comedies and tries hard to incorporate some of the lesser-known works. Dine from a British pub–style menu provided by Chef for a Night catering before performances. You can buy beer, wine, coffee, tea, and soft drinks before performances and at intermission. Ticket prices range from $12 to $32 depending on which night you come and whether you are in the balcony, the box, or on the main floor.
125. 7 Stages
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (404) 523-7647
Address: 1105 Euclid Ave. NE
Description: From its humble beginnings in a storefront in 1979, 7 Stages has grown into a major company operating two theaters in a former Little Five Points movie house. Risk-taking is a hallmark: An anti-Klan musical staged here in 1986 provoked the first Ku Klux Klan rally in the city in 30 years. Typical productions include experimental plays, dramas by local writers, international works, and alternative stagings of classics. The complex has a 200-seat main stage and a 90-seat black box space (entrance in the rear). Recent seasons featured the musical Hair by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, Dude, Where’s My Planet? by Heidi Howard, In Search of Tonto Blue by Tony Brown and Kari Margolis, and Mr. Universe by Jim Grimsley. Ticket prices begin at $10.
126. Theater Emory
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (404) 727-5050
Address: 600 Ashbury Circle
Description: Theater Emory is a professional theater company operating in resident at Emory University. Undergraduates collaborate on significant and challenging artistic projects and plays with professional artists: directors, actors, designers, playwrights, dramaturgs, technicians, and stage managers, including the department’s core faculty. In some cases, students can even earn credit. Performances take place in three locations: The Rich Memorial Theater, The Mary Gray Munroe Theater, and the Theater Laboratory in the Schwartz Performing Arts Center. General admission is $18, $6 for students.
127. Theater of the Stars
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (404) 252-8960
Address: 4469 Stella Dr. NW
Description: Since 1952, Theater of the Stars has brought national touring companies’ shows to Atlanta. The regular season runs from June to August, and performances are given at the Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree St. Past presentations have included Grease, 42nd Street, A Chorus Line, Les Misérables, The Music Man, and Phantom of the Opera. Having seen these same productions on Broadway, we can attest to the fact that the touring company shows are staged as glamorously and performed as diligently at ticket prices well below Big Apple fare.
128. Theatrical Outfit
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (404) 577-5257
Address: 84 Luckie St.
Description: Theatrical Outfit was founded in 1976 in a space above an old Laundromat in Virginia-Highland. In 1985, the company scored a big hit with a lavish production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show that featured soon-to-be-famous, cross-dressing Atlantan RuPaul. Now the company stages five productions a year, most often on Southern themes, such as Cotton Patch Gospel, which is very popular with local audiences. In spring 2004, the company moved into its own theater space on Luckie Street.
129. Aurora Theatre
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (770) 476-7926
Address: 1128 East Pike St.
Description: After more than a decade in suburban Duluth, and an 11th season spent in interim spaces around Lawrenceville, Aurora Theatre moved into its new home in a converted church on the Lawrenceville Courthouse Square in spring 2007. A professional repertory company produces several fully staged plays each summer season in its intimate 200-seat main hall.
130. Spivey Hall
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (770) 961-3683
Address: 5900 North Lee St.
Description: Fifteen miles south of Atlanta (off I-75), Clayton State College is home to what many view as the finest performance venue in the entire metro area. Since it opened in 1991, the $4.5 million Spivey Hall has won raves from critics and performers alike. Overlooking a 12-acre lake, the 398-seat hall’s centerpiece is its 79-rank, 4,413-pipe Ruffatti organ. Spivey Hall presents some 175 concerts annually, covering a broad range of musical traditions. Subscription packages let patrons choose to attend all the concerts of a certain type, such as piano, organ, or jazz, or custom-design their series with six or more concerts. In addition to guest-artist concerts, Clayton State College music students and faculty perform in the hall.
131. Theatre in the Square
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (770) 422-8369
Address: 11 Whitlock Ave.
Description: This professional company, whose 225-seat facility is housed in a former cotton warehouse, attracts the second-largest audience of any Atlanta area theater (the Alliance Theatre takes the top spot). The company found itself at the center of an international controversy in 1995 when local politicians, outraged at a risqué comedy staged here, Lips Together, Teeth Apart, passed Cobb County’s infamous and divisive resolution condemning “the gay lifestyle.” The ensuing uproar caused the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games to move the preliminary Olympic volleyball events Cobb County had been scheduled to host. The theater stages at least six productions a year including two holiday shows. The theater’s traditional holiday offering is 1940s Radio Hour.
132. Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Telephone: (404) 880-6644
Address: 223 James P. Brawley Dr. SW
Description: Open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and noon to 4 p.m. Saturday, this college art gallery has an extensive collection of African-American work. Included in the collection are examples from 20th-century masters Charles White, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Romare Bearden. The galleries are on the second floor. Admission is free.
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Address: 503 Peeples St. SW
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Address: 1280 Peachtree St. NE
City: Atlanta, GA
Category: Shopping
Address: 571 South Kilgo St. NE