The La Jolla Playhouse: Movie Stars and Summer Stock
Near La Jolla, California
La Jolla has a genuine Broadway pedigree, and it starts with three movie stars. In nineteen forty-seven the actors Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Mel Ferrer founded the La Jolla Playhouse. Peck had grown up in nearby San Diego, and the idea was simple and glamorous.
Bring famous film actors down to the seaside for the summer to do real theater between movies. It worked. Through the late nineteen forties and nineteen fifties the Playhouse drew stars like Groucho Marx, Vivian Vance, and Eve Arden, and the whole crowd tended to unwind afterward at the Pink Lady hotel down in the village.
The original run went quiet in nineteen fifty-nine, and the Playhouse sat dark for more than two decades. Then, in nineteen eighty-three, it was revived on the campus of UC San Diego, where it still performs today. In its second life it became one of the most important theaters in America, a launching pad for shows that go on to Broadway, with well over a hundred world premieres and, in nineteen ninety-three, the Tony Award for the country's outstanding regional theater.
