What’s new in the arts this week

Experience Shakespeare at the Old Globe via free at-home tour

VIRTUALLY SPEAKING

It’s been at least 15 months since I’ve been inside the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park. Talk about absence making the heart grow fonder. It was at the Globe that I saw my very first live theater. I must have been 12 or 13 at the oldest. A few years later it was at the Old Globe’s outdoor Festival Stage venue that I enjoyed a production of “Romeo and Juliet” with the first girl I was ever in love with … and her mom and her sister, but it was still dreamy. In more recent years, I visited the Globe’s three theaters many times each year as a working drama critic in San Diego. The memories are too many and too precious to count.

Why this indulgence in nostalgia? Because the Old Globe is offering a free at-home tour of its archives that it calls “Shakespeare in San Diego: The Virtual Experience.”

By no means is this digital version of an exhibition the Globe debuted five years ago a substitute for seeing and hearing live Shakespeare at the theater. But it is an educational self-guided tour of the Globe’s 86-year archives of photographs, costumes, props and more. You can scroll through the material at your own pace. Go slowly and take hours if you want. The items are captioned in detail. Kudos to Sean Fanning and Kevin Anthenill for the digitalization.

For me, costumes without people wearing and moving in them are just pieces of clothing, and the props are what you make of them. But the photos in the archives, some dating back to the ’30s, provide a historical perspective not only on the Old Globe but on the San Diego of the 20th century. I wonder what parking in Balboa Park was like in those days? theoldglobe.org