La Jolla Playhouse’s WOW FESTIVAL Transforms UCSD Into a Playground of Immersive Performances
The free, all-ages celebration features site-specific theatre, music, dance, puppetry, installations, and interactive experiences (April 23-26)
Think of the WOW Festival as one giant playground for the imagination—where kids, teens, and grown-ups can all find something to get excited about.
From April 23–26, the La Jolla Playhouse transforms UC San Diego into a four-day, choose-your-own-adventure of theatre, music, dance, puppetry, and larger-than-life spectacle. For families, it’s less about sitting still and more about jumping in.
Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse.
Within that expansive, anything-can-happen energy, the Young Audiences programming offers one of the most accessible ways in—especially over the weekend, when Warren Mall becomes a home base for families. From 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, the space offers free, continuous programming, where families can move freely between works, encountering a rotating ecosystem of artists whose storytelling leans more on image, rhythm, and movement.
photo © Alexis Lancien, courtesy La Jolla Playhouse.
The family-friendly lineup begins with Out of Body Expo (created by the WOW artistic team), which transforms cardboard, foam, and tape into roaming oversized puppets that move through campus like a living installation. From there, the tone swings into the elastic physical comedy of Jam Side Up!, where precision and chaos collide in a fast-building world of flying objects and heightened absurdity, before softening into Carry On by Presque Siamoises, a more intimate, participatory work that traces the relationship between parents and children.
in La Jolla Playhouse’s Performance Outreach Production (POP) Tour,
Colorín, Colorado; photo by Jenna Gilmer.
Colorín, Colorado, the La Jolla Playhouse POP Tour for young audiences, explores identity and memory through bilingual storytelling, while Fool’s Gold: A Trickster Revue, featuring high school performers, channels trickster tales into clowning, chaos, and big, playful energy. Sound and movement take center stage in Rhythm Delivered by DrumatiX, where buckets, boxes, and found objects become a kinetic percussion system, and in Suzik by FORCE, where three performers navigate Chinese pole work through balance, trust, and resistance to gravity.
That sense of collective energy continues in Mucca Pazza Plays Around by Mucca Pazza, a roaming brass band that turns walkways and open space into an unpredictable, evolving performance field. Terra Firme shifts the register toward grounded physicality, exploring connection to land and stability through movement-based performance that centers weight, balance, and presence. The participatory vocal work Choir! Choir! Choir! transforms audiences themselves into the performance, while Again! Again! ($25) by Mister & Mischief becomes a participatory clown piece about caretaking, where repetition, trial and error, and shared play form a cycle of “trying, failing, and trying again” between performers and audience.
Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse.
Beyond this family-focused entry point, the festival expands outward into a broader environment of discovery. Interactive installations are present throughout the grounds, inviting audiences to stumble into unexpected visual and sensory experiences between performances, while the Tech Theatre Mobile Lab opens a hands-on window into lighting, sound, and theatrical technology, offering a rare glimpse into how performance is built in real time.
Taken together, these elements reinforce what unfolds across the weekend: a festival designed less around sitting and watching, and more around moving, exploring, and participating. That openness sits at the heart of WOW’s philosophy. As Artistic Producing Director Eric Keen Louie notes, “Where else can you spend four days going from a brass band marching with its own cheer section, to a vertical circus, to a crowd-created choir… and almost all of it free?” That range, he emphasizes, is the point: “art has no single shape—and neither does an audience.”
For audiences planning a visit, the festival website serves as a practical guide, with daily breakdowns organized by themes, locations, and time blocks, along with the ability to build a personalized schedule in advance. Food and drink options are also mapped throughout the campus.
Getting there is equally straightforward, with the festival accessible via public transportation, offering a simple way for families to move in and out of campus throughout the weekend. Full details, along with schedules, planning tools, and dining information, are available at the official WOW Festival site.
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