Old Globe plans June return to outdoor stage

Two days after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a conditional plan to begin reopening the state to “business as usual” by June 15, The Old Globe in Balboa Park on Thursday said it hopes to return to its outdoor stage with live entertainment as soon as early June.

With California vaccination levels high and COVID-19 hospitalizations declining, the state could be cleared of its tiered restrictions program by mid-June. In anticipation of that, Old Globe artistic director Barry Edelstein and managing director Timothy Shields sent an email to the theater’s 50,000-person database on Thursday morning with some brief reopening plans for the summer.

Edelstein and Shields wrote that they were already working on a plan to reopen the Globe’s 620-seat outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre in June under the rules unveiled last week for outdoor live performances. But the governor’s announcement Tuesday led them to scrap that plan and start over.

The last performance the Old Globe hosted before an audience on its outdoor stage was the closing night of “Romeo and Juliet” on Sept. 15, 2019. It takes the Old Globe about six weeks every spring to prep the festival theater for its summer season, so that process will begin soon. But the first show on the festival stage this summer may not be a full-scale Shakespeare production.

In an interview with the Union-Tribune late last month, Edelstein said that depending on seating restrictions or safety protocols required for performers onstage, it’s possible the first shows the Old Globe produces outdoors might feature a small cast of just a few actors.

One of the biggest obstacles that remained to producing outdoors, he said, was restrictions on seating capacity that could make it prohibitively expensive to produce a show for a fraction of the regular audience. But if the tiered system that now restricts seating capacity is eliminated by June, that will make a big difference in what the Old Globe can present.

Because the situation is changing weekly, Edelstein and Shields said in the email that the best strategy is to have lots of different reopening strategies so they’re prepared for any scenario.