Actress Jo Garcia-Reger strikes a pose on TSF Media Day at Van Cliburn Auditorium. Rehearsals, stage designing and set building are all underway as the cast and crew prepare the 2024 season of the festival. (Lucas Strough/Kilgore News Herald)

KILGORE — Each summer, a small miracle occurs in Kilgore as the cast and crew of the Texas Shakespeare Festival stage, dress, direct and perform four theatrical productions, a children’s show and a staged reading — all in only a few months.

The festival opens this season at 7:30 p.m. June 27 with a performance of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”

This year’s lineup also includes Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” “Peter and the Starcatcher,” the musical “Sweeney Todd,” the all-ages play “Tinker Bell” and a staged reading of “Jane Eyre.”

Find a schedule and tickets at www.texasshakespeare.com .

Tony Galaska, the lighting designer for the 2024 season, is a festival veteran. This year will make his sixth season at the festival since he first worked with the company in 2006.

When Artistic Director Meaghan Simpson asked if he was available for the season, Galaska, who lives and works in Florida, said he’d “love to come back.”

As a lighting designer, he works to create the right mood and atmosphere for each performance, and lighting cues must be synced to the actors’ movements and scene changes.

“I just got here, so I’m excited to spend some time here,” Galaska said Thursday.

He said the crew is beginning “designer runs,” which are performances allowing the designers to determine lighting and sound cues.

“And (on Friday), we’ll have something called ‘paper tech’, where the director and the sound designer and myself will all sit in a room and talk about where all the cues are going to go, just on paper, before we even get to turning on lights in the theater,” Galaska said. “We’ll have it all planned out and prepped so when we get into the technical rehearsals where the actors are here, people will already know where things are going. We roll into work right away, and we get busy pretty quick!”

That’s no exaggeration. Work on the festival is year-round, but things really amp up in May when cast and crew members begin to arrive in Kilgore.

In just a few weeks, they have to learn lines, choose lighting, make costumes and build the sets.

Galaska said the intense schedule is great training and experience and has helped him get other jobs. Recently, he worked for the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. He said the artistic director there told him, “If you can do TSF, if you can do four shows in rotating repertoire, you can do anything.”

Galaska said he’s excited for the season. Each of the shows being has its own way of reaching out and connecting with the audience, he said.

“I think all of these plays this season are just fantastic,” Galaska said. “Each one is either very timely to the world we’re in right now or is just full of fantasy and wonder, which we also need right now. There’s also a little bit of escaping reality. There’s that really beautiful balance.

“There’s something that everyone can connect to and find ways into the story that they’re going to be able to see here on stage. That’s really exciting.”

Maxwell Franko is this season’s sound designer. It’s his first season with the festival, and he said he learned about it and applied from Austin, where some friends told him about their good experiences in Kilgore.

“With four different shows, it’s a super mix of everything. There are some shows I’ll be composing music for, and for some of them I’ll be finding sound effects to fit what is happening onstage,” Franko said. “Some of them, like ‘Sweeney Todd,’ I’ll be creating this creepy atmosphere and it’s totally from scratch. When you do four different shows, you do a lot of different things.”

Matt Zambrano is directing “Peter and the Starcatcher,” a Tony Award-winning play based on a novel that relates the story of Peter Pan’s magical journey.

The director has a history with the show, holding “a very special place in my heart for many years,” he said.

“In 2013, I was doing regional theater at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. I played Ted, who is one of the orphan boys. When I got to work on that play, I just fell in love with it,” Zambrano said. “Then I moved to New York and got a job at Disney on Broadway where I led workshops, directed shows at schools, taught classes. One of the things I got to do was to build study guides for a show, and I got assigned ‘Peter and the Starcatcher.’

“So I did a lot of dramaturgical work, digging into the story and the characters and the style. I’ve just been waiting for an opportunity to work on it again so when I saw TSF would be doing it, I talked to Meaghan (Simpson) and said ‘this would be a dream show for me.’ ”

He said he’s happy to be returning to Kilgore for the festival, which has a unique quality all its own.

“You know, I’ve worked a lot regionally, worked in a lot of different theaters around this country, and there’s something special about Texas Shakes,” Zambrano said. “The community that they create together is amazing, given that everyone is working on three or four shows at once, but there’s never any ego. Everyone is cooperative, working towards making the best shows possible.

“And we have some of the top artists at the top of their game, the costume designers that we have here are unrivaled, and Meghan Potter, who does all the scenic and set work, is just a genius and is able to take four different shows and make it all make sense.”