"The Barber of Seville", Houston

The Classical Theatre Company is the only professional organization in the Houston area that exclusively produces classical dramas all year round. The reasoning behind this choice is simple: the company makes its mission to "boldly re-envision classical drama" by breathing new life into the works of authors such as Shakespeare, Marlow, Ibsen, and Shaw.

During staged readings and full productions, CTC's artistic team always seeks inventive ways to "take old plays and give them a never-before­-seen quality." But despite their conceptual changes—such as setting Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in a Nazi concentration camp or turning Hamlet into an espionage thriller with ties to whistle-blower Edward Snowden—the company always respects the original playwrights and maintains the integrity of the original prose, often illuminating how many of those "old" plays are now more relevant than ever.