A grass amphitheatre on the slope above Barton Springs Road, with a stage built in 1938 and a summer musical running on it every year since 1959. The first production was a show called Seventeen, cast largely with high school students, and about four hundred people watched it. The audience now runs to more than sixty five thousand across a season, and it has never cost anything to attend. That is the unusual part. The Zilker Summer Musical is among the longest running free outdoor musicals in the country. It started as a project of the Austin Parks and Recreation Department, and since 1987 has been produced by the organisation now called Zilker Theatre Productions, which was founded specifically to make sure it kept happening. Productions are full scale book musicals with orchestras, not concert readings. The theatre is formally named the Beverly S. Sheffield Zilker Hillside Theater, after the parks director who shaped much of Zilker. People arrive early with blankets and coolers and sit on the hill, which slopes naturally toward the stage, and there are no seats and no tickets. On a summer night the audience spreads a long way back up the grass, with the tops of the downtown towers visible behind the stage, and it is one of the few things in Austin that is genuinely free and genuinely large.
Getting there
30.2644, -97.7725
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