Shakespeare & Company has announced its Gala 2025, slated for Saturday, June 28, will honor award-winning actors Annette Miller and John Douglas Thompson.
In addition to performing on its stages – including together in Richard III in 2010 – both actors are alumni of Shakespeare & Company’s Center for Actor Training, which offers acting intensives and workshops for artists at varied stages in their careers and provides the basis for the company’s aesthetic.
Bev Hyman, chair of Shakespeare & Company’s Board of Trustees, said Miller and Thompson’s bodies of work – at once prolific, diverse, and acclaimed – exemplify the Center for Actor Training’s focus on training the voice and body, but also imagination, intellect, and emotion.
“Seeing Annette or John perform is enough to help any theatergoer understand what’s unique about Shakespeare & Company’s Center for Actor Training,” she said. “The actor’s ability to connect with the audience, to speak what they feel, and, above all, to make every word accessible, separates this training from the rest.”
Miller, a leading actor at Shakespeare & Company for more than 25 seasons, has performed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in Boston, in regional theaters, on television, and in film.
Among many other roles, she’s appeared as publisher Mrs. Tanken in the Oscar-nominated film Don’t Look Up alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, and on television in recurring roles on As the World Turns and Ryan’s Hope. Just last year, she earned a Special Citation for a Lifetime of Defining Performances from the Boston Theater Critics Association.
Miller has garnered numerous awards for her work at Shakespeare & Company alone, including the Elliot Norton Best Actor Award and the Independent Reviewers of New England Best Actor Award for her performance as Golda Meir in Golda’s Balcony in 2002 – a role she originated. In 2023 and 2024, Miller reprised her Golda’s Balcony performance with Shakespeare & Company at its Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre and again at Boston’s Emerson Paramount Center. This season, she features in the Company’s World Premiere of Lawrence Goodman’s The Victim.
A Tony Award nominee for August Wilson’s Jitney, Thompson’s acting career began in New England, including roles with Shakespeare & Company. In 2005, he made his Broadway debut as Flavius in Julius Caesar with Denzel Washington and went on to play Le Bret in the 2007 Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac alongside Jennifer Garner and Kevin Kline.
He plays opposite Washington again in the upcoming film Highest 2 Lowest directed by Spike Lee, and currently portrays Arthur Scott on HBO’s The Gilded Age, for which he was nominated for a Screen Actors’ Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.
Thompson has won three Obie Awards, three Drama Desk Awards, three Elliot Norton Awards, one Outer Critics Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, an NAACP Award, and many other accolades for his stage performances. In 2024, he made his Royal Shakespeare Company debut in the titular of Othello – a role he’s played several times, including at Shakespeare & Company in 2009. He’ll appear this year in Shakespeare & Company’s Jewish Play Festival on Sunday, Oct. 12, as part of a reading of Roz & Ray by Karen Hartman.
Shakespeare & Company’s Gala 2025 will be held at its campus in Lenox, Mass., in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, and include a cocktail hour, performance, dinner by The Old Inn On The Green, and dancing with DJ Justin Allen. Proceeds benefit Shakespeare & Company‘s Center for Actor Training, Education Program, and Performances.
Limited tickets are available; single tickets range from $500 to $1,250, and table sponsorships are available from $5,000 to $25,000. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit shakespeare.org, write to Liam Castellan at lcastellan@shakespeare.org, or call (413) 637-1199 ext.145.
About Shakespeare & Company
Shakespeare & Company was founded in 1978 by Tina Packer. Located in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the Company offers performance, education, and actor-training opportunities year-round, and attracts more than 40,000 patrons annually with a core of more than 150 artists.
About The Center for Actor Training
The aesthetic of Shakespeare & Company was devised by Founding Artistic Director Tina Packer, Founding Director of Training Kristin Linklater, and a cadre of expert teachers. The Center for Actor Training’s approach is continually investigated, redefined, and reinvigorated, and welcomes actors, directors, writers, and teachers from all over the world to work with the Company’s faculty. Some of its notable alumni include Karen Allen; Lauren Ambrose; Oliver Platt; Keanu Reeves; Alicia Silverstone; Courtney B. Vance; Sigourney Weaver, and Raquel Welch.
About Annette Miller
Annette has performed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in Boston, in Regional Theaters, and in Film and Television. She has been a leading actor at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass. for 25 seasons. Annette was awarded a Special Citation at the 2024 Elliott Norton awards ceremony, for her body of work and recent sold-out reprisal of Golda’s Balcony at Shakespeare & Company and at Boston’s Emerson Paramount Theater, in February and March 2024. She was acclaimed by The Wall Street Journal as the best actor of the 2020 season in regional theater for her performance as Gladys Green in The Waverly Gallery. She received the 2018 Berkshire Theater Critics Association Award for Outstanding Actor in a Leading Role for her portrayal of Katherine in Mothers and Sons. Annette originated the role of Golda Meir in Golda’s Balcony before it went to Broadway for which she received both Boston’s Elliot Norton Best Actor Award and the Independent Reviewers of New England Best Actor Award. In Florida, she received the Carbonell Best Actor Award nomination for her portrayal of Vi in August Osage County and the Elliot Norton Best Actor Nomination for her role as Martha Mitchell in Martha Mitchell Calling. Other favorite roles include Maria Callas in Master Class, Madam Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard, Vera in 4,000 Miles, Diana Vreeland in Full Gallop, Duchess of York in Richard III, and Maria in Twelfth Night.
Annette’s film credits include Mrs. Tanken in Don’t Look Up with Leonardo DiCaprio, You Will Not Play Wagner (featuring Annette, which has been successfully seen at the New Plaza Cinema in NY and the Miami, Sarasota, Boca, Chicago, and Vancouver Jewish film Festivals and this June at the prestigious Berkshire International Film Festival.), Company Men, Autumn Heart, The Imported Bride Groom, The Next Karate Kid, The Eye Has to Travel (documentary on Diana Vreeland) and See How She Runs. On TV, Annette had recurring roles in As The World Turns and Ryan’s Hope. Other awards include the Boston Jewish Film Festival Award and the Zev Cohen Leadership Award. Annette studied with Stella Adler and holds a BA and MFA from Brandeis University. She is currently an Affiliate Scholar at Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center where she wrote and continues to perform for organizations and colleges Now is Our Time: for a Theatrical Collage on the Pleasures and Perils of our Third Chapter.
About John Douglas Thompson
Broadway credits: Jitney (Tony Award nomination), King Lear, Carousel, A Time to Kill, Cyrano de Bergerac, International: Othello at RSC, The Merchant of Venice at Royal Lyceum Theater. Off-Broadway: Irish Rep: Endgame (Obie Award), Public Theatre: Hamlet (Audelco Award) Julius Caesar, Troilus & Cressida, King Lear; BAM: The Iceman Cometh (Obie Award, Drama Desk Award), TFNA: The Merchant of Venice, A Doll’s House, The Father, Macbeth, Othello (Obie, Lucille Lortel Award), Tamburlaine the Great (Obie, Drama Desk); Westside Theatre: Satchmo at the Waldorf (Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle Award, NAACP Theatre Award); NYTW: Hedda Gabler; Regional: Huntington Theatre: Man in The Ring (Elliott Norton Award), Commonwealth Shakespeare Company: The Tempest (Elliott Norton Award), ART: Othello, Richard II, Antigone, Henry V, Mother Courage, ACT: Hamlet; Mark Taper: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Ovation Award); Shakespeare & Company: Red Velvet, Othello, King Lear, Richard III; Wilma Theater: Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train (Barrymore Award); Film: Highest 2 Lowest, Till, The Bourne Legacy, Glass Chin, Michael Clayton, and Wolves. Television: The Gilded Age, Bull, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Law & Order: SVU, Madam Secretary, Person of Interest. Additional Awards: Matador Award, Robert Brustein Award, Samuel H. Scripps Award, Eugene O’Neill Award, AAFCA Distinguished Achievement Award, Elliott Norton Sustained Excellence, and the Earle Hyman Award.
