Friends remembered the co-founder of the Utah Shakespearean Festival as an intelligent, charming and demure woman with a great sense of humor.

Adams, 76, died from complications of a heart condition and diabetes.

In 1961, she and her husband Fred C. Adams founded the Utah Shakespearean Festival. The two met while she served as the dean of women at Southern Utah State College, now Southern Utah University. And it was during their engagement that the two conceived the idea to create a theater festival in Cedar City, a calling that would come to define the couple's life.

"She worked hand-in-hand with Fred in the dreaming and the working to make it happen in those early years," said R. Scott Phillips, the festival's executive director and a close friend of the Adams for more than 30 years. "She was the first person who really provided the thread for all of the music at the festival."

Barbara Adams shepherded the festival's music department for more than two decades, until she retired to spend more time raising her four children.

In the festival's early years, she taught other theater company members to play Renaissance-era songs on recorders. Her group was noted for its promotional efforts, which involved dropping by area businesses, unannounced, and inviting employees and shoppers to attend that night's plays.

"She had so much music and was so available to me because I didn't know what I was doing," said Christine Frezza, festival music director from 1985 to 2005, and the theater company's resident composer. "Her knowledge was far greater than mine."

Frezza regarded Barbara as an older sister, and she credited Barbara and Fred Adams for teaching her, then a recent East Coast transplant, how to behave like a Utahn. Barbara Adams is survived by her husband, their four children and 12 grandchildren.