Much to the annoyance of the patrons and staff of the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, the Utah Marlowe Festival begins its inaugural season in St. George in 2016 with a performance of “Romeo and Juliet.”

“That’s right, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’” said the Utah Marlowe Festival executive director Bruce Bailey. “You believe everything you read or something? Prove to me that Marlowe didn’t write it. C’mon, prove it!”

The new theater festival is straining already tense relations between dramatic organizations in St. George and Cedar City.

“This is outrageous,” said Fred C. Adams, founder of the Utah Shakespeare Festival while angrily loading a Beretta. “Why can’t they just do ‘Dr. Faustus’? Assholes.”

“Christopher Marlowe was like the James Bond of poets,” Bailey said. “Shakespeare was just some pothead. Heck, he probably didn’t even exist. Unless you believe that, like Bruce Wayne and Batman, these dudes lived in London at the same time and never met. Right. Whatever.”

“So help me God, if they actually do this, I will kill myself,” said USF veteran Brian Vaughn. “As the Bard himself wrote, ‘All places are alike, and every earth is fit for burial.’”

“Wait … that was from ‘Tamburlaine,’” Vaughn added under his breath. “Dammit!”

Bailey announced that the season will continue with “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” “Edward III,” and “Little Shop of Horrors.”

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” lamented Adams.

In other news, The Crystal Lake Salieri Festival enters its first season in January, pissing off the patrons of the nearby Woodstock Mozart Festival, The Moron Tabernacle Choir will present its premier performance in Provo in February, and Hurricane Utah’s Infinite Number of Monkeys With an Infinite Number of Typewriters and an Infinite Amount of Time Festival is slated to give its debut performance, “MacBeth.”

At press time, Cedar City Mayor Maile Wilson was organizing a local renegade militia to perform their own rendition of “The Jew of Malta.”