La Jolla Playhouse

With a youthful spirit and eclectic, artist-driven approach, La Jolla Playhouse has advanced theatre as an art form and as a vital social, moral and political platform, earning its place in the international theatre scene. The Playhouse’s brilliant and innovative productions of classics, new plays and musicals, including 56 world premieres, 32 commissions and 30 American or West Coast premieres, have merited over 300 major honors, including 21 Tony Awards for productions that have transferred to Broadway, along with the 1993 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.

Founded in 1947 by Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer, the Playhouse is comprised of three venues and is a not-for-profit, professional theatre in residence situated on the UCSD campus. The Mandell Weiss theatre is a 492-seat proscenium arch theatre and was the first La Jolla Playhouse theatre introduced in 1983. The $4.9 million Mandell Weiss Forum followed in 1991 and houses 400 seats, a thrust stage, a rehearsal hall, two courtyards and an outdoor lobby. Inagurated in 2005, the newest of the La Jolla Playhouse theatres is the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre, a black box flexible theatre seating up to 450 patrons, and the centerpiece of the 6,500-square-foot Joan and Irwin Jacobs Center.

La Jolla Playhouse has garnered more than 300 local and national awards for its productions, including a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and 26 Tony Awards for its Broadway transfers. Among these plays are Jersey Boys, 700 Sundays…Billy Crystal…A Life in Progress, I Am My Own Wife, The Who’s Tommy, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. To top it off, La Jolla Playhouse received the Tony Award for outstanding American Regional Theatre on April 22, 1993.