The Old Globe

Shakespeare on Stage and on Screen Highlight
80th Summer Season, Balboa Park Centennial

The Old Globe in San Diego will celebrate its 80th Anniversary as part of the Balboa Park Centennial Celebration with a 2015 Summer Season featuring Shakespeare onstage and in film.

Tony Award winner for A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder and former Old Globe Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Darko Tresnjak returns to direct the musical classic Kiss Me, Kate, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, book by Sam and Bella Spewack, and choreography by Peggy Hickey, in association with Hartford Stage.

Director Rebecca Taichman, whose time-traveling Time and the Conways fascinated audiences last April, is back to direct Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Six-time Tony Award nomineeScott Ellis, who has three shows on Broadway this season, will make his Old Globe directorial debut with Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.

Rounding out the season is the West Coast premiere of Ken Ludwig's comedy Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery.

Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors will run in the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre. Kiss Me, Kate will play on the Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage in the Old Globe Theatre and Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery in the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre, both part of the Globe's Conrad Prebys Theatre Center.

The Globe will also present a series of free Monday night films relating to Shakespeare through the eras. The series kicks off June 29 with Laurence Olivier's 1944 version of Henry V in the Festival Theatre. It will be followed by Orson Welles's 1965 classic Chimes at Midnight on July 13 and Joss Whedon's 2012 Much Ado About Nothing on Aug. 3 (both in the Globe Theatre). The series will conclude on Aug. 24 with West Side Story, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins's 1961 New York City riff on The Bard's Romeo and Juliet, in the Festival Theatre.

“In 2015, San Diego marks the centennial of the Panama-California Exposition and the 80th birthday of the Old Globe," Artistic Director Barry Edelstein said in a press release. "Both anniversaries celebrate the vibrancy of Balboa Park, a place that defines this city as a cultural force to be reckoned with nationwide, and both deserve great festivities. The Globe has put together a summer season of laughter, fun, and the most vivid theatricality we could muster. Outdoors, we will present two of Shakespeare's most crowd-pleasing plays, in productions by American visionaries. Indoors, we'll welcome one of our closest friends to reimagine a classic musical with a Shakespeare connection of its own, and we'll present the West Coast premiere of a new stage adaptation of a beloved Sherlock Holmes mystery. Plus, as a special double-anniversary gift to San Diego, we're going to throw our doors open for free screenings of four of the best Shakespeare films ever made. It's going to be a summer-long party on our campus, and a demonstration of all the wonders the Globe has brought our city for eight decades.”

Season subscriptions can be purchased online at www.TheOldGlobe.org, by phone at 619-23-GLOBE [234-5623], or by visiting the box office at 1363 Old Globe Way in Balboa Park. Subscriptions to the Globe's 2015 Summer Season range from $97 to $346. Discounts are available for full-time students, patrons 29 years of age and younger, seniors, and groups of 10 or more.

October 1, 2014

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