The Old Globe unveiled its 2024 season on Thursday morning, featuring a dozen shows that range from upbeat comedies and world premieres to Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, a musical, an eye-popping spectacle and its long-in-development “Henry 6” Shakespeare project.
With the addition of its annual “Grinch” and “Ebenezer Scrooge” holiday plays, and its Globe for All and Old Globe-University of San Diego Shakespeare productions next fall, the Globe’s calendar will be just as packed in 2024 as it was in the years before the pandemic. But Globe artistic director Barry Edelstein said that the Globe has not been immune to the twin challenges that have devastated the theater industry nationwide — shrinking audiences and higher production costs.
The 2024 season will not have a big-cast summer musical on its main stage, but it will have two productions imported from other cities and a handful of smaller-scale shows with as few as two actors. Edelstein said one of the hardest tasks theater leaders have faced since the pandemic ended is figuring out how to lure past and potential theatergoers away from their televisions and back to live theater again.
“This season represents our best thinking about what people want to see and how theater can really excite audiences to turn off ‘Ted Lasso’ and come back inside,” he said, referring the feel-good Apple TV+ series that became must-watch TV during the pandemic.
Among the shows this past Globe season that did prove to be big audience draws were the 25th annual production of “Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!,” which set an all-time sales record, the July debut of Montreal’s The 7 Fingers stage spectacle “Passengers” and the two summer Shakespeare comedies on the outdoor stage.
A scene from the 2022 Broadway production of “Fat Ham.” The Old Globe will produce the play’s San Diego premiere during its 2024 season.
(Bruce Glikas / Getty Images)
As a result, Edelstein said he has planned a 2024 season “with a very heavy emphasis on joy and themes that are upbeat. There’s been clear and deep thinking about saying our objective is to remind people what’s wonderful about the theater and hope that is what gets them to come back.”
Tickets for the 2024 season are now on sale at theoldglobe.org. Here’s a look at the 2024 schedule in the Globe’s three theaters — the mainstage Old Globe Theatre, the in-the-round Sheryl & Harvey White Theatre and the outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre. (This schedule does not include the fall 2024 Shakespeare and holiday shows.)