Arson and a Second Act
The Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park was built in 1935 as a temporary structure for a world's fair, and it was so obviously worth keeping that when the fair ended, San Diego kept it. Forty-three years later, someone set it on fire. The theater burned almost completely, taking with it costumes, archives, and the accumulated atmosphere of four decades of performance. And San Diego rebuilt it — not as a replica, but as something better, because a city that serious about its theater was not going to let arson have the last word.
A Replica That Became Real
The original Old Globe was constructed for the California Pacific International Exposition of 1935 as a partial replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London — scaled down, Californianized, but recognizably in the tradition of the original. The exposition brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to Balboa Park, and the theater staged abbreviated performances of Shakespeare for audiences who might otherwise have never encountered the plays live.
When the exposition closed, the building and the theater company that had performed in it found reasons to continue. The Old Globe became a producing theater rather than a fair attraction, staging full seasons of classical and contemporary drama for San Diego audiences. Craig Noel joined the company in its early years and would go on to direct there for more than fifty years — a tenure remarkable enough to make him a significant figure in American regional theater history.
The Night of the Fire
On March 8, 1978, arson destroyed the Old Globe. The fire was set deliberately, though the perpetrator was never conclusively identified. Costumes, props, and irreplaceable records burned. The building that had been a temporary structure for a 1935 world's fair and had somehow become a beloved institution was reduced to a shell.
The response from San Diego was immediate and generous. The community rallied behind rebuilding the theater, contributing money and support at a scale that surprised even those who organized the campaign. The rebuilt Old Globe opened in 1982 — a permanent, professional theater facility that was substantially better than what the fire had destroyed. The lesson the city took from the disaster was that it wanted this institution, and that wanting it meant building something worthy of that commitment.
Tony Awards and Broadway
The rebuilt Old Globe quickly established itself as one of the leading regional theaters in the country. In 1984, the American Theatre Wing awarded it the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre — recognition that the Old Globe belonged in the company of the institutions that were defining what serious American theater could be outside of New York.
That recognition was built on a record of production and development that has continued to grow. Old Globe productions have won thirteen Tony Awards on Broadway. Shows developed and premiered in Balboa Park have included works that went on to long runs and significant cultural impact. The same dynamic that operates at the La Jolla Playhouse operates here: distance from New York creates a particular freedom, and the Old Globe has used that freedom productively.
Shakespeare in the Park
The Old Globe campus in Balboa Park now includes three performance spaces: the main Old Globe Theatre, the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre — an outdoor amphitheater — and the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre for smaller productions. The outdoor theater hosts Shakespeare performances each summer in conditions that Elizabethan theater-goers would not have recognized but might have appreciated: the mild San Diego evening air, the sound of the city beyond the park's trees, the particular atmosphere of drama performed under an open sky.
The campus sits within the larger cultural ecosystem of Balboa Park, adjacent to museums and gardens and the other performance venues that make the park something more than a collection of attractions. Theater-goers who arrive for a production often extend their evening into the park, or their afternoon into the museum next door, creating the kind of civic cultural experience that the park's designers a century ago had in mind.
From the Air
The Old Globe Theatre complex sits in the center of Balboa Park, near the California Building tower, identifiable from the air as part of the park's dense cultural campus.