Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:32:00

It was built as a temporary structure to stage 50-minute Shakespeare condensations at a fair, and it has burned to the ground and risen again since. The Old Globe at 1363 Old Globe Way in San Diego's Balboa Park is now one of America's leading regional theatres. The origin was the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition: architect Richard Requa modelled the open-air playhouse on Shakespeare's London Globe via the Chicago World's Fair copy, and when the fair closed, citizens raised the money to roof and rebuild it permanently; the San Diego Community Theatre reopened it in December 1937. Fire rewrote the campus twice: an arson blaze destroyed the original theatre on 8 March 1978 - a hastily built outdoor Festival Stage saved that summer's Shakespeare festival - and a second arson fire took that stage in 1984; the rebuilt 580-seat Old Globe opened in 1982 with As You Like It, and the 620-seat Lowell Davies Festival Theatre followed in 1985. The three-stage complex - completed by the 250-seat arena-style Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre - produces about 15 plays and musicals a year, from the summer Shakespeare festival to a steady pipeline of new works, plus the annual Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The institution's scale is easy to underestimate: an operating budget around 30 million dollars, San Diego's largest arts employer, over 250,000 annual attendees, and a Broadway transfer record that has made it a national development house. Practical notes: the theatre sits beside the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park's central plaza, evening shows pair naturally with the park's gardens and museums, and the outdoor Festival Theatre's summer Shakespeare under open sky remains the signature San Diego theatre experience. The wartime interruption is its own footnote: the U.S. Navy commandeered Balboa Park during the Second World War, pausing the company's run in its own house - otherwise the San Diego Community Theatre, renamed the Old Globe in 1958, has operated continuously on the site since December 1937.