Picture forty-five-minute Shakespeare performances luring fairgoers here in 1935, when this replica of London's Globe rose in Balboa Park. The theater was built in 1935 as a replica of Shakespeare's original Globe Theatre in London, constructed for the California Pacific International Exposition as a venue for abridged forty-five-minute performances of Shakespeare's plays — designed to let fairgoers sample the Bard between exhibits. It was meant to be temporary.
Instead it became permanent, and the Old Globe grew into a Tony Award-winning resident company that has produced dozens of Broadway-bound productions over its ninety-year history. The list of productions that moved from the Old Globe to Broadway or national tours includes Into the Woods, The Full Monty, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. In 1978, an arsonist burned the original building to the ground; the theater community's response — raising funds and rebuilding within three years — demonstrated just how central the institution had become to the city's cultural identity.
The current complex includes three performance spaces: the outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, the smaller Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre, and the main stage that bears the Old Globe name.