Canceled Shakespeare Colorado Shakespeare Festival patrons who had bought tickets to the now-canceled July 14 performance of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” can exchange them for any other 2018 festival performances by contacting the CU Presents box office at 303-492-8008 or cupresents@colorado.edu.

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival will once again receive its pound of flesh from the University of Colorado’s Athletics Department over a scheduling conflict involving the Boulder campus’s two signature outdoor venues.

This time, though, it’s going to cost more.

CU athletics officials this week agreed to pay the Shakespeare festival $150,000 to cancel a performance of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” at the Mary Rippon Theatre after they booked a loud rock concert — Grateful Dead spinoff Dead & Company — at nearby Folsom Field on the same night in July.

Campus spokesman Ryan Huff said that negotiated amount is meant to compensate the Shakespeare festival for lost ticket sales and concession revenue from the scrubbed July 14 production.

Yet when this same double-booking happened in 2016, the Athletics Department paid less — about $100,000 — to get the Shakespeare festival to cancel three separate performances over two days.

Why the price hike?

“The fact that this scheduling conflict happened again played into the amount,” CU spokesman Ryan Huff said. “Athletics and CSF got together and negotiated this number, and both parties are satisfied.”

Huff previously had acknowledged that the Athletic Department was aware of the Shakespeare festival’s 2018 schedule prior to booking this summer’s two Dead & Company concerts. The chosen nights simply worked best with the Dead’s schedule, he added.

The Boulder campus, Huff said in announcing the “Love’s Labour’s Lost” cancelation, is committing “to better schedule coordination going forward so that CSF performances and stadium concerts can go on in the summer at different times.”

This year, the Shakespeare festival only is canceling the outdoor performance that conflicts with Dead & Company, fearing the Bard would be drowned out by the strains of “Dark Star” wafting across campus.

Patrons are encouraged to exchange tickets for other performances, and, while a box office representative on Friday said refunds are not being offered, Huff noted that they will, ultimately, be made available to those who can’t attend alternate nights.

The July 13 performance of “Richard III,” which overlaps with the first of the Dead’s two Boulder stadium concerts, will proceed since it’s being staged indoors at the University Theatre.

“This was a difficult decision, and we are deeply sorry for any inconvenience this causes for our CSF patrons,” Tim Orr, the festival’s producing artistic director, said in a statement. “We are working hard with our campus partners to ensure that, in future years, event dates can be scheduled to avoid cancelations.”

The clash between Shakespeare and rock shows predates, by three decades, the revival of stadium concerts at CU that began with Dead & Company’s back-to-back shows in the summers of 2016 and 2017 and will continue this July.

In 1986, the head of the Shakespeare festival tried to convince CU leadership to block a Van Halen concert that the student promoters from Program Council had booked at Folsom on the opening night of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” at the Mary Rippon Theatre.

That failed, and, according to the Daily Camera’s archives, the Shakespeare festival accepted a $15,000 payment from Program Council to reschedule — and a promise that such a snafu would never happen again.

Matt Sebastian: 303-473-1350, sebastianm@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/mattsebastian