Qualla: Where Hollywood Came Home to Make Theater

Where Hollywood Came Home to Make Theater: Introduction

Fri, 08 May 2026 04:45:08 GMT

Three Hollywood stars walked away from the cameras in 1947 and did something unexpected: they started a theater. Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Mel Ferrer were already famous, already wealthy, already the kind of people who didn't need to prove anything. And yet they kept coming back to La Jolla every summer, convinced that the best work of their careers might happen not on a sound stage but in front of a live audience.

Where Hollywood Came Home to Make Theater: A Summer Experiment

Fri, 08 May 2026 04:45:08 GMT

The La Jolla Playhouse opened its first season in 1947 in a converted movie house near the University of California campus. The three founders brought in fellow actors, directors, and designers who were willing to work for scale — sometimes less — because the work itself was the ...

Where Hollywood Came Home to Make Theater: Resurrection on the Campus

Fri, 08 May 2026 04:45:08 GMT

The revival came from an unexpected direction. In 1983, the University of California San Diego partnered with a new nonprofit organization to reopen the playhouse on the university campus. Under artistic director Des McAnuff, it found a new identity — not as a celebrity showcase ...

Where Hollywood Came Home to Make Theater: The Pipeline to Broadway

Fri, 08 May 2026 04:45:08 GMT

The Playhouse's most lasting contribution to American theater has been its role as a development laboratory. Productions incubated in La Jolla have traveled to Broadway more than three dozen times, carrying the theater's imprint into the mainstream of American culture. The list ...

Where Hollywood Came Home to Make Theater: Theater as Place

Fri, 08 May 2026 04:45:08 GMT

Today the Playhouse occupies three performance spaces on the UCSD campus in the Torrey Pines neighborhood, each designed for a different kind of theatrical experience. The Mandell Weiss Theatre seats more than 500 for large productions. The smaller Mandell Weiss Forum allows for ...