The Old Globe

The Old Globe is one of the country's most respected regional companies, a Tony Award winner in Balboa Park that's been pushing productions toward Broadway since 1935. It runs three stages on the campus: the traditional-format Globe, the intimate Arena, and the outdoor Festival stage, so the room itself changes character depending on the show you came to see.

Programming runs all the way from Shakespeare, where the whole thing started, to contemporary premieres that often transfer to bigger markets afterward. If you can swing it, the summer Shakespeare on the outdoor Festival stage is the move, because doing it under the open sky in this particular park is a completely different kind of evening than sitting indoors.

And the setting is the quiet flex: the theater is surrounded by Balboa Park's gardens and museums, so you can easily make a full afternoon of it before curtain instead of just showing up cold. The park is reachable by bus from downtown San Diego. Find what the Old Globe is staging on Evil Tickets and plan the whole day around it.