Great Lakes Theater, originally known as the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, is a professional classic theater company in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. Founded in 1962, Great Lakes is the second-largest regional theater in Northeast Ohio. It specializes in large-cast classic plays with a strong foundation in the works of Shakespeare and features an educational outreach program. The company performs its main stage productions in rotating repertory at the Hanna Theatre in Playhouse Square, which reopened on September 20, 2008. The organization shares a resident company of artists with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. On its main stage and through its education programs, GLT connects approximately 85,000 adults and students to the classics each season. GLT's artistic directors have included Arthur Lithgow, Lawrence Carra, Vincent Dowling, Gerald Freedman, James Bundy and Charles Fee. Origins A professional regional theater, The Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival (GLTF), was launched in 1962 with a $50,000 budget (). Driven and supported by community members and volunteers at its inception, the theater continues to operate as a non-profit with a $3.6 million annual operations budget. Later to become the first GLTF director, Arthur Lithgow directed Shakespeare Under the Stars, a professional summer theater troupe at Antioch College where he was a faculty member. Between 1952 and 1957, the troupe performed all of Shakespeare’s plays and began traveling across Northeastern Ohio to perform at Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, at an old movie theater in Cuyahoga Falls, and at the Toledo Zoo. By 1962, the troupe was seeking a space to perform permanently while, simultaneously, a group of citizens led by the Lakewood Board of Education president, Dorothy Teare, were seeking cultural activities to occupy the Lakewood Civic Auditorium during the summer months. Thus, the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival formed and premiered the first production, As You Like It, on July 11, 1962. It continued at the Lakewood Civic Auditorium that season and performed six of Shakespeare plays in rotation. Notable moments While the theater began staging Shakespeare productions exclusively, the repertoire expanded to other theatrical classics beginning in 1965. Eventually, to better capture that scope, the name was changed to Great Lakes Theater Festival (GLTF) in 1985. In 1982, the GLTF moved from Lakewood to the Ohio Theater in Cleveland to become the first resident company in Playhouse Square, an historic district home to several 1920s venues. On September 20, 2008, GLTF relocated again to the newly renovated