In fall 2013, La Jolla Playhouse presented its very first Without Walls Festival, featuring about a dozen adventurous, interactive and site-specific theater pieces around the Playhouse campus at UC San Diego.
Nearly a decade later, the WOW fest is still going strong. So strong, in fact that beginning this week, it will transform from a biennial to an annual event. This year’s fest, coming off two years of mostly digital WOW shows, will include a robust 24-show lineup at Liberty Station, the site of its last full-length, in-person festival in 2019. Tickets to many performances at this year’s festival — running Thursday through April 24 — are already sold out. Fortunately, more than half of this year’s shows are free of charge and many are being presented outdoors.
The Playhouse’s Tony Award-winning artistic director Christopher Ashley said WOW is a favorite project because it reaches a nontraditional theater audience and celebrates the beauty of San Diego.
“The audience response has been so warm and eclectic and diverse and many of them are people who wouldn’t necessarily go to see a play in the theater,” Ashley said. “Going to a yearly format will allow us to explore other nooks and crannies of San Diego. We’ll come back to campus every couple of years and then we’ll explore more of the world of San Diego.”
Ashley said many of the shows being presented next weekend were originally booked for a 2021 WOW fest that never took place due to the pandemic. That gave the artists more time to develop their pieces, and he’s excited to see what they come up with. The lineup includes many San Diego theater artist as well as artists from Canada, Australia, Mexico, France, New York and Los Angeles.
One of the shows he’s most excited about this year is “La Bulle” from the Canadian troupe…