The Old Globe will celebrate its 80th Anniversary as part of the Balboa Park Centennial Celebration with a 2015 Summer Season featuring Shakespeare onstage and in film.
2014 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 (pictured), whose time-traveling Time and the Conways fascinated audiences last April, is back to direct Shakespeare’s delightful and romantic Twelfth Night. Six-time Tony Award nominee Scott Ellis, who has three shows on Broadway this season, will make his Old Globe directorial debut with Shakespeare’s hilarious The Comedy of Errors.
Rounding out the season is the west coast premiere of Ken Ludwig’s comedy Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery.
The Globe will also present a series of free Monday night films relating to Shakespeare through the eras to celebrate both the Balboa Park Centennial and the theatre’s 80th Anniversary. On June 29, 2015, the Globe will present Henry V, directed by Laurence Olivier in 1944, 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 August 3 (both in the Globe Theatre), and the series will conclude on August 24 with Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s groundbreaking 1961 New York City riff on the Bard’s Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, in the Festival Theatre.
“In 2015, San Diego marks the centennial of the Panama-California Exposition and the 80th birthday of The Old Globe. 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,” said artistic director Barry Edelstein. “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.”
The complete 2015 Summer Season is as follows:
June 21 – July 26, 2015 (opens June 27)
Twelfth Night
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Rebecca Taichman
August 16 – September 20 (opens August 22)
The Comedy of Errors
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Scott Ellis
July 1 – August 2, 2015 (opens July 9)
Kiss Me, Kate
With music and lyrics by Cole Porter, book by Sam and Bella Spewack
Choreography by Peggy Hickey, Directed by Darko Tresnjak
July 24 – August 23, 2-15 (opens July 30)
Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery by Ken Ludwig
For more information about the 2015 season and all of the productions at the Old Globe, visit www.theoldglobe.org.
Shakespeare in LA 