The Old Globe: 75 and Still Going Strong (San Diego: San Diego News Network)
Seventy-five is the Diamond anniversary. And this is the year to celebrate the many facets of the Old Globe.
It was back in 1935 when Shakespeare plays were first produced at the Balboa Park theater, as part of the California Pacific International Exposition. During the two years of that World’s Fair, abbreviated versions of the Bard’s works were performed in repertory.
When the exposition ended in 1937, a non-profit producing corporation, the San Diego Community Theatre, leased the Globe theater and adjacent buildings from the City of San Diego (an arrangement that continues today) and renovated the theater for ongoing use.
On December 2, 1937, the remodeled Old Globe Theatre opened with a production of John Van Druten’s “The Distaff Side.” In the cast was a young actor named Craig Noel, who became the founding artistic director of the theater. His artistic leadership would guide the Globe’s growth through 75 years of productions, through good times and bad, including war, arson, destruction, rebuilding, remodeling and a recent expansion.
After his seven decades of devotion to San Diego and the Globe, Noel recently died at age 94, but his legacy lives on. He helped to create the three-theater complex at the Globe, establish San Diego Junior Theatre, introduce San Diegans to out-of-the-mainstream playwrights like Beckett, Brecht and Albee, and provide a platform for rarely heard, multicultural voices, initiating Teatro Meta and cross-border programs.
An exciting lineup
All of those efforts are represented in the Globe’s 75th celebration.
“Our year kicks off with a very special 75th anniversary Shakespeare season,” says executive producer Lou Spisto.
That includes a new, high-profile Shakespeare Festival artistic director, Adrian Noble, who served as the artistic director and chief executive of England’s prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company, from 1990 to 2003. Noble is also the author of “How To Do Shakespeare” (Routledge Press, 2009), a Bard-lover’s guide to performing, listening to and appreciating the great works.
“Adrian brings a specific and unique set of experiences and understanding of the plays,” says Spisto. “This will be a very important and exciting season, celebrating our birthright.
“We began as an attraction at a World’s Fair, and have become the sixth largest regional theater in the country, with 250,000 admissions each year. We’ve been nurtured by an incredible number of artists, volunteers and staff, none more important than Craig. The summer season is a testament to his vision and strength.”
Spisto says this Shakespeare repertory season will look different from prior summers, even those that were also designed by the Tony-nominated San Diego State University professor Ralph Funicello.
San Diego:
“This will be much more environmental, acknowledging where we are in Balboa Park,” Spisto explains. “There will be the feel of an outdoor setting. And each production will look more distinct, with different playing spaces and more variety in how they morph into each other.”
Once again, as in the last summer season, there will be one non-Shakespearean play in the mix. “The Madness of George III,” by Alan Bennett, joins “King Lear” and “The Taming of the Shrew.” Noble directs “George” and “Lear,” which stars Globe associate artist and recent San Diego transplant Robert Foxworth.
“It’s not necessarily something we’ll do every year,” Spisto says of combining Shakespeare with other plays. The experiment was a huge success last year, with a stellar production of “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
“It wasn’t something Craig really wanted,” Spisto admits. “But he was adamant about going back to being a repertory company, as we had been before. And that was one of the first things I did when I came here eight years ago.”
Noel also bemoaned the dearth of “big plays” at the Globe.
“He wanted to see a return to the glory days,” adds Spisto. “And we have been doing bigger cast shows in the past few years. We provide about 1,000 actor-weeks a year, which is extremely high for our kind of theater. We’re employing a lot of actors — and more local actors, since the inception of ‘The Grinch’ 13 years ago. And we’ve increased the audience size. In the last eight years, we’ve gone from total sales of less than 60% to more than 80%. We’re not sold out, but we’re doing very well.”
Open House
Now, in honor of its 75th year, the Globe would like to invite San Diegans to have some fun and see what’s ahead in this celebrational season. This is a tradition that was begun for the Globe’s 70th anniversary, providing a gala Open House, a day of free activities and entertainment for the public, to see what’s up at the Globe.
During the kickoff to the event, which will be held on Sunday, June 13, Marion Ross (best known for her years on TV’s “Happy Days”) will portray Queen Elizabeth. Ross, a graduate of SDSU, has been a dear friend of Craig and the Globe, and has performed on Globe stages many times (she’s also appearing this summer in “The Last Romance,” July 30 to September 5).
During the course of the Open House afternoon, there will be short preview performances from this summer’s Shakespeare Festival, as there were in the Globe’s very first year. Also on hand: swordfight demonstrations, circus performers, bagpipe players, Kids Crafts with the Rad Hatter, face painting and, harking back to the theater’s early years, Elizabethan dancing. Up until the late 1980s, there was Dancing on the Green before each Shakespeare performance.
“That was Annette Bening’s first professional gig,” Spisto says with a chuckle, referring to the screen actor who grew up in San Diego.
A Winter’s Tale
Spisto is very enthusiastic about the winter season this year, too.
“It’s a big season with lots of actors, lots of large-scale productions. We didn’t plan it this way, but we realized that the connective thread is Family –- familial relationships and difficulties, trying to get together, trying to get out. The damage that’s done by families as well as the joy. We’re trying to balance classics with new things that will stretch us.”
The biggest “new” thing is the 2008 Tony and Pulitzer winner, “August: Osage County.”
“Not every theater would attempt that,” says Spisto of Tracy Letts’ epic dark comedy. “There are some very bold things in the story. It’s a big work, a great piece of art. It fits us well. And we’re one of only two theaters doing it right off the national tour” [coming to the Globe May-June of 2011]. The director is Sam Gold, “one of the hottest young directors we’ve seen in years, currently the darling of New York.”
Following the path forged by Craig Noel, this year’s multicultural voices will come from “Rafta, Rafta…” by Ayub Khan-Din, a comedy about an East Indian family in London; and “Groundswell,” by Ian Bruce, a suspenseful drama set in South Africa, directed by Kyle Donnelly, head of the acting program at UC San Diego, whom Spisto calls “a local and national treasure” (both run March-April 2011).
“Welcome to Arroyo’s,” a Pulitzer finalist by Nuyorican playwright Kristoffer Diaz, will play at the Globe and also at Lincoln High School, part of the theater’s Southeast San Diego outreach program. Two DJs in the cast will spin records during the show.
“We want to appeal to the whole San Diego community,” says Spisto, “and reach out to a younger audience.”
The classics will be Arthur Miller’s masterwork, “Death of a Salesman” (Jan.-Feb. 2011) and a Neil Simon double-bill: “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound” (Sept.-Nov. 2010).
“Salesman” is part of the Globe’s Classics Up Close series, and the Simon plays come on the heels of last year’s “Lost in Yonkers,” which was, says Spisto, “the most popular play in recent history on our second stage.”
The same director, Scott Schwartz, will helm these two Simon plays, part of his BB trilogy (the third is “Biloxi Blues,” which isn’t included here because it would require a whole different set).
“Scott is a gorgeous director, and we wanted him back,” says Spisto. “We knew, with his sensitivity to the work, he’d elevate it. These are probably Neil Simon’s best plays, and they deserve further exploration. Doing them on a repertory schedule makes it even more of an event. Both can be seen individually, but they’ll be connected, so it becomes an experience.”
Final negotiations haven’t been completed on the musical that will cap the season, but Spisto did say that this one will be “bigger, with an eye toward moving on.”
So Broadway, get ready.
Right now, though, Spisto and Company are focused on welcoming San Diegans in, to check out the new Old Globe.
“We want to open our doors to the community,” he says. “We’re still here because the community supports theater. We love the community and we want them to be part of us.”
Source: San Diego News Network, June 4, 2010
Author: Pat Launer