Christopher Ashley names his 13 favorite La Jolla Playhouse productions

At the end of this year, La Jolla Playhouse’s longtime artistic director Christopher Ashley will step down after 18 years at the regional theater’s helm.

La Jolla Playhouse’s outgoing artistic director Christopher Ashley reflects on his 18-year legacy

We asked him to choose the Playhouse-produced shows or events that he has loved the most since arriving here in 2007. He came up with 13. Here they are, along with his comments on why they were special to him.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” —  2010

Christopher Ashley directed this exuberant production of William Shakespeare’s forest-set comedy which featured songs, cirque-style aerialists, puppetry by Basil Twist and youth symphony musicians onstage. Of the experience he said: “One of the first shows I directed here was ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and I went to the set and props department and said ‘I think I need a grand piano that plays and I need it to float up in the air and then flip over with the person who’s still playing it.’ I sort of expected a referral to our local rehab center, but in fact they said ‘yeah, let’s see how we can make that work’ and they did.”

“Come From Away” — 2017

Ashley won the 2017 Tony Award for Best Direction for Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s heartwarming musical, which made its world premiere at the Playhouse in 2015. It’s based on the true story of how the residents of a small Newfoundland town took in and cared for nearly 7,000 American passengers who were stranded there for five days after all U.S. passenger planes were grounded in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. “That was such an enormous passion project in my life,” Ashley said. “I think by now I’ve directed it here, Seattle, Toronto, (Washington) D.C., Broadway, London, Melbourne and Tokyo and the national tour. I was in rehearsal with it a lot for a decade. It’s basically a story of how we take care of other people, particularly strangers …  who is us and who is them and what kindness can do for the world. As I kept working on it, the circumstances of the world kept adjusting. It kept feeling like a story that was worth telling.”

The Wow Festival — 2013

In 2013, Ashley created the first of these now-annual, site-specific theater, dance, visual art and immersive entertainment festivals on the UC San Diego campus (WOW is an acronym for “Without Walls”). Artists from around the world created work inspired by public art pieces, buildings and outdoor features on campus. Two of Ashley’s favorite shows in the inaugural WOW Festival were “The Car Plays,” where actors seated in a line of parked cars performed brief plays for audiences of one or two at a time. The second was puppeteer Basil Twist’s “Seafoom Sleepwalk,” performed on the beach at La Jolla Shores. A team of puppeteers erected a massive puppet of the love goddess Aphrodite that a group of surfing actors “worshipped.” Then Aphrodite turned around, became a sea monster, devoured the actors and sunk into the sea. “We did it six times and its audience doubled in size every single time. It was incredible,” he said.

The POP Tour

Launched at the Playhouse in 1987, the Performance Outreach Program (POP) Tour commissions and produces new play for young audiences every year that goes on tour to San Diego primary schools. Ashley didn’t create the program, but he’s passionate about its mission, particularly at a time when arts funding for schools is diminishing. “I love the experience of watching those students see what for many of them is their first play. I love watching their imaginations explode as they discover that this kind of storytelling is possible and wonder how they can be a part of this. Those are some of the best days of my 18 years here.”

“Is It Thursday Yet?” — 2023

This world premiere dance, theater and video piece was co-created and co-choreographed by dancer Jenn Freeman and director Sonya Tayeh, with original music by composer/performer Holland Andrews. Freeman based the work on her own experience being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at age 33. Ashley said he loved how the show was received. “Our audience really embraced it, despite the fact that it was a dance piece. The central person doesn’t speak until the last 10 seconds of the show. But it was still emotionally available and honest about the difficulties of a midlife diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. And oh my gosh is Jenn a gorgeous performer in every possible way. The audience jumped into this whole different kind of storytelling and they loved it.”

“Here There are Blueberries” — 2022

This world premiere play was co-written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, directed by Kaufman and co-produced by his Tectonic Theater Project. It was inspired by the true story of a mysterious photo album assembled in the 1940s by a Nazi officer at the Auschwitz concentration camp that was kept hidden away for more than 50 years. The photographs depict the carefree and playful off-hours lifestyle of the German death camp’s workers. “When Moisés first pitched it to me, I thought this is a play about this photo album and the pictures that are in it? How is that going to work dramatically? But he really found this beautiful emotional way through this photo album and the hidden mystery of it,” Ashley said. The play has since gone on to multiple productions off Broadway and around the country.

“Sumo” — 2023

First presented in the Playhouse’s DNA New Work Series, then produced by the Playhouse in a world premiere co-production with Ma-Yi Theater Company, Lisa Sanaye Dring’s play “Sumo” is the story of six young Japanese men training and competing to be elite sumo wrestlers. Ashley said he loved seeing the play gradually develop over a series of workshops. “Every time, they would say ‘can we put this onstage a little bit more?’ ‘We need a drum.’ We need a circle of sand.’ Watching those artists find the sound of the show, find the physicality of the show and find the open door to the story of the show was very beautiful. It was one of the shows that I enjoyed watching 10 and even 20 times.”

“The Outsiders”  — 2023

This world premiere Playhouse musical was written by bookwriter Adam Rapp, composers/lyricists Jamestown Revival and arranger/orchestrator/bookwriter/lyricist Justin Levine. The musical was based on S.E. Hinton’s classic 1967 coming-of-age novel about gang of troubled teens in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the subsequent film by Francis Ford Coppola. Its 2024 Broadway production won four Tony Awards, including for Best Musical and director Danya Taymor. “We were their first production,” Ashley said. “It was great watching how they took the information they got from their production in La Jolla, reworked what they felt they discovered needed more time and held on to the things that were already gold. I enjoyed just watching them use La Jolla as the best kind of testing ground. When it opened on Broadway, it was in extroardinary shape. I will also say that the fight sequence in Act Two is one of my favorite bits of choreography and design together — ever.”

“The Heart”  — 2025

Produced at the Playhouse this past summer, the world premiere musical was written by Kait Kerrigan, Anne Eisendrath and Ian Eisendrath and directed by Christopher Ashley. Based on a French novel and re-set in San Diego with an electronic dance music-inspired score, it’s about the heartbreaking but engrossing 24-hour period when a dedicated team of medical professionals harvest and transplant the heart of a brain-dead young man into the chest of a woman with only months to live. “I loved the EDM score,” Ashley said. “It feels so unique to that show. It was amazing to be in San Diego making a story about the local medical community, particularly the transplant community where San Diego is at the leading edge of medical technology. I enjoyed watching the doctors, nurses and medical personnel of all stripes care so much about getting that story told right. It was one of the shows that emotionally was so involving to work on. There was not a day that I was not crying. It was the best kind of tears about really being with the characters and caring so much about what they’re going through.”

“Blueprints to Freedom: An Ode to Bayard Rustin” — 2015

The Playhouse commissioned actor/playwright Michael Benjamin Washington to write and star in this play about the real-life Black activist who organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but was later brushed aside by the era’s Civil Rights leadership because he was openly gay. Of Washington’s play and Lucie Tiberghien’s direction, Ashley said: “He told the story of this extraordinary man who was caught between his identity as an activist in the Civil Rights community and his identity as a gay man. There was one sequence where he was starting to realize what he had to do to make the march happen and it was expressed onstage with him acting as a type of orchestra conductor, putting all the pieces of that march together like music. It was theatrically told and a stunning stage work.”

“Glengarry Glen Ross” — 2012

Christopher Ashley directed this contemporary classic drama by David Mamet. It’s the story of a group of increasingly desperate real estate salesmen during recessionary times in early-1980s Chicago. Ashley’s staging, produced during the Great Recession when real estate prices were once again depressed, featured a diverse cast in a crackling, gritty production. Of his experience with the play, Ashley said: “That play is so beautifully structured. I had this extroardinary set which was a tiny little scene in a Chinese restaurant that then flew up to reveal the destoryed office behind it. We had an amazing cast of people who I think in productions before then wouldn’t have been cast in that show, and they together told that story in such a lovely way. It’s one of the shows I’m proudest of.”

“El Henry” — 2014

Co-produced as part of La Jolla Playhouse’s WOW program with San Diego Repertory, Herbert Siguenza’s world premiere play re-set Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part I,” in a “Chicano Mad Max”-style California in the year 2045. It was staged outdoors by Rep artistic director Sam Woodhouse on bleacher seating on a junk-filled East Village block. Of the experience, Ashley said: “It was beautiful piece of writing and one of the collaborations I enjoyed the most.”

“3 Summers of Lincoln” — 2025

Christopher Ashley directed this world premiere musical last spring, featuring a book by Joe DiPietro, lyrics by DiPietro and Daniel J. Watts and music by Crystal Monee Hall. It told the story of the friendship between U.S President Abraham Lincoln and abolitionist Frederick Douglass and how their shared beliefs and mutual respect reshaped the Civil War and led to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Ashley said the musical, written about a time when America was deeply divided, seemed just right for today’s political climate. “There are some times when you’re doing a show when it feels like it speaks to the moment in the culture without being baldly on the nose,” Ashley said. “The story is an exploration of how do you take a divided country, chart a path through it and back together, and that absolutely crushing priority of we have to end slavery in America. And how do you balance that with ending the war? Together, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln created the blueprint for that moment for progress. It’s such a brutal moment in American history and so hopeful in the way that that show charges through it.”