Pasadena Playhouse

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Pasadena Playhouse
View into the auditorium

The Pasadena Playhouse is a theater in Pasadena near Los Angeles , California. It was designed and built by architects Elmer Gray , A. Dwight Gibbs, and Cyril Bennett . The auditorium has 686 seats. The theater mainly shows self-produced plays and musicals.

history

Since about 1912 the Little Theater Movement developed in cities and towns in the United States. The ensemble, for which the Pasadena Playhouse was later built, can be traced back to 1916, when actor and director Gilmor Brown began producing a number of plays in a renovated burlesque theater with his group The Gilmore Brown Players . Brown founded the Community Playhouse Association of Pasadena in 1917 . This amateur theater group grew rapidly, and construction began on the theater at 39 South El Molino Avenue in May 1924. The theater was completed in 1925. The theater was designed in the style of the Spanish Colonial Revival by the artist and architect Elmer Gray . In 1937 the Playhouse was named the official state theater of California by the Californian parliament after being the first theater in the USA to show all of Shakespeare's dramas on its stage.

An acting school was established in the late 1920s, which was recognized as an accredited college in 1937. Several prominent actors studied there, including Raymond Burr , Victor Mature , Ernest Borgnine , Eleanor Parker , Charles Bronson , Makoto Iwamatsu , Jamie Farr , Gene Hackman , Dustin Hoffman and Sally Struthers .

Due to changes in law and the opening of drama departments in many schools and universities across the country, the school closed in 1969. Later that year, following the death of Gilmor Brown, the theater itself went bankrupt.

In 1986 the Pasadena Playhouse reopened as a community theater . Over the next 20 years, the theater staged classical and modern plays as well as musicals.

Known students

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ www.netstate.com
  2. ↑ www.library.ca.gov
  3. ↑ www. britica.com
  4. ↑ latimesblogs.latimes.com
  5. ↑ www.off-stage-right.com ( Memento from June 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ latimesblogs.latimes.com

Coordinates: 34 ° 8 '42.4 "  N , 118 ° 8' 13.8"  W.