The Shakespeare in Washington Festival — the first of its kind to be held in the area — is the brainchild of Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center, who conceived the idea two years ago. He contacted Michael Kahn, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater Company, to curate it, and the wheels of preparation began to turn. More than 60 organizations in every facet of the arts will collaborate to bring together over 500 events commemorating Shakespeare.

“It’s been the first time that the arts community has collaborated on such a large scale,” said Liza Lorenz, press and public relations manager of the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

The half-year of events inspired by the one and only Bard of Stratford-Upon-Avon launched on Jan. 6 with a free staged reading of “Twelfth Night” at the Kennedy Center.

Participating organizations are optimistic about the festival’s success. Tickets have been selling fast, and the festival is likely to boost sales in the traditionally slow tourist months of January and February, said Rebecca Pawlowski (COL ’99), director of communications for the Washington, D.C. Convention and Tourism Convention.

Organizers are especially excited about the range and number of events planned.

“Volume, volume, volume,” Garland Scott, head of external relations at Folger Shakespeare Library, said of the festival’s events. “The sheer number of different companies and groups performing really gives audiences a unique opportunity to see why [Shakespeare] is quite probably the greatest playwright and poet in the English language.”

“This [festival] is really designed to show Shakespeare influenced the arts — not just theater, but also music, opera, dance and the visual arts,” Pawlowski added.

Though people have celebrated Shakespeare countless times in all corners of the globe, the nation’s capital serves as an unexpectedly fitting location to celebrate the Bard and his influence through the ages.

“Washington has a huge amount of resources when it comes to Shakespeare,” Lorenz said, noting that Folger Library is the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare literature and that three theater companies perform Shakespeare regularly in the District. “Our artistic director feels that Shakespeare wrote about many of the issues that we still grapple with today and that his depiction of power and obsession with power make him very popular in Washington.”

The Shakespeare Festival will even reach the heights of the Hilltop. Professor Michael Collins regularly teaches an introductory English course called “Shakespeare,” but this semester, his class will take advantage of the festival and attend three plays — “Richard III,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Coriolanus.”

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” performed by the American Shakespeare Center, will be performed here at Georgetown on March 30 at the Walsh Black Box Theatre. Tickets range from $20 to $36.

In addition to Collins, several Georgetown faculty members are Shakespeare experts, including Garrett Sullivan, Joan Homer and Lindsay Kaplan. The university also holds the first folio of Shakespeare in Lauinger Library.

The festival is an international celebration, drawing different interpretations of Shakespeare from around the nation and world. One of the premier ballet companies in the world, Kirov Ballet from Russia, is performing “Romeo and Juliet” from Jan. 16-21 at the Kennedy Center Opera House. This particular production was created specifically for the company in 1940 by Leonid Lavrosky and features the music of Sergei Prokofiev. Tickets range from $47 to $125.

The Classical Theater of Harlem will be performing “King Lear” at the Folger Theatre from Jan. 18 through Feb. 11. Andre De Shields, a Baltimore native who has twice been nominated for a Tony Award, is heading the ensemble as King Lear himself.

The Folger Shakespeare Library also provides free lesson plans to teachers of Shakespeare. The Folger Theater stage is an Elizabethan replica of the famous Globe Theater for which Shakespeare wrote many of his plays.

“King Lear” is one of the lesser-performed works of Shakespeare, which makes it especially memorable to the festival’s higher-ups. The Classical Theater of Harlem, a new company founded in 1999, will be performing the play in a new light: Most of the actors are African-American.

“It’s great to highlight a company that casts African-Americans to perform Shakespeare,” Scott said. Feb. 2 is slated as College Night, and all tickets will be available at a fixed price of $10. Discounted student tickets can be purchased in advance for $22-$40, and students can get tickets at half price ($16-$25) one hour before performances.

For those a little strapped for cash, there is also the Shakespeare in American Life exhibit at the Folger Library from March 8 to April 18. To commemorate the library’s 75th anniversary, the exhibit will feature everything from books to portraits to comic books that were influenced by Shakespeare from the era of colonization to the present.

Aside from the staple ballet and operatic performances of Shakespeare’s works, other events are not quite so typical.

The Synetic Theater is presenting a wordless adaptation of “Macbeth” from Jan. 11 to Feb. 25 at the Rosslyn Spectrum in Arlington, Va. Combining movement, dance, mime and music, this variation of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy is sure to silently entertain. Tickets are $30, with student tickets at $25 (rush tickets are $15 at the door on the day of performances).

But perhaps the most unique and unconventional performance of the festival is the Tiny Ninja Theater’s production of “Hamlet” at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. Tiny Ninja will also do a reading of “The Sonnets” at The George Washington University. The characters are — what else? — tiny ninja figurines from vending machines around New York. The production is entirely a one-man show (minus the figurines).

“I decided to do something original,” founder Dov Weinstein said. “I think it makes a nice contrast: The grand place that Shakespeare has in our culture and his heightened language with a performance with these tiny little figures.”

Armed with hundreds of little figurines, Weinstein is certain that his is the only show of its kind. “It’s a grand spectacle on a tiny scale,” he said. “There are no small parts, only small actors.”

Admission is free, and no tickets are required. Both “Hamlet” and “The Sonnets” will run from June 11-14.

From art to dance to theater to song to film, there has never been a playwright quite like Shakespeare.

“Basically, Shakespeare tells good stories,” Collins said. “There is a strong and engaging narrative line in Shakespeare … that attracts people to adapting the stories into different media.”

Scott loves the flexibility of Shakespeare’s works.

“Every production is its own world,” Scott said. “Shakespeare is so elastic.”

A glimpse at the schedule of events is testimony to the fact that there is something for everybody at the Shakespeare Festival in Washington this year.

“The gift of ‘Shakespeare in Washington’ is that it gives people an opportunity to try Shakespeare in a way that is comfortable for them,” Scott said. “The Festival is an embarrassment of riches.”