Shakespeare Santa Cruz and the UC Santa Cruz Shakespeare Workshop present an exhibit of materials from past productions of Much Ado about Nothing and Macbeth, curated by student interns at Shakespeare Workshop from the Shakespeare Santa Cruz archive. The event will include opening remarks by Charles Pasternak & Paul Whitworth and light refreshments.

Tickets are now on sale for Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s 2026 Season, featuring Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

The 2026 season runs from July 16 – August 30.

Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare’s wittiest and most beloved comedies. Of all the couples in Shakespeare, perhaps none is more widely loved than Beatrice and Benedick. Their battle of wits, their antagonism turned to eroticism, their history. Before the play begins, they already seem to define each other. The audience, like the other characters in the play, wait with excitement as their wits clash, and eventually, as their love blossoms.

Dark, bloody, brutal, and magnificent, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is one of the greatest plays ever written. Its central couple, ironically, is one of Shakespeare’s happiest. At least at the beginning. Macbeth explores what we become when our second half is ripped away. A powerful unit, wildly in love with each other, the Macbeths follow the insinuations of the witches – the famous weird sisters – and commit murder in the name of their shared ambition: the throne of Scotland. But even with their goal achieved, Macbeth’s paranoia and guilt lead him further down the road of blood. The central unit tears apart under the shadow of its deeds. Who are these two without each other? Slowly and surely, the play shows us society’s ruin in the form of its leading pair. Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s production of Macbeth stars Dan Donohue in the title role and Paige Lindsey White as Lady Macbeth.