San Diegans have long known that Old Globe founding director Craig Noel is a treasure. In fact, he received the city’s rarely bestowed Living Treasure Award.
He was also honored with the California Governor’s Award for the Arts and made the San Diego Union-Tribune’s list of 25 people who shaped the city’s history.
The San Diego Theatre Critics Circle named its annual awards the “Craig Noel Awards for Excellence in Theatre,” and historically Noel bestows each award personally, shakes the awardee’s hand and poses for a photo.
Nonetheless, when one mentioned the name Craig Noel to someone on the other coast, even to someone theatrically savvy, the response was likely to be “Craig who?”
That was then, this is now. So there.
In a ceremony at the White House Nov. 19, Noel received the National Medal of Arts from President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush.
The medal won’t make Noel any more Republican than he ever was, but the 92-year-old living legend accepted with his customary style and grace and was photographed with a smile on his face and the president at his side.
In another pose with Old Globe executive director Lou Spisto, Noel wears a smile and the huge medal hangs around his neck.
Noel received the award “” a presidential initiative established in 1984 and managed by the National Endowment for the Arts “” for “his decades of leadership as a pillar of the American theater. As a director of hundreds of plays and a mentor to generations of artists, his work has inspired audiences and theater producers across the nation.”
Few theater artists devote a lifetime to one organization. Noel did just that. Born in New Mexico in 1915, he came to San Diego as a child, acted in plays at San Diego High School and decided to become an actor.
Fresh out of high school, he attended San Diego State University, then called State College. To make extra money, he worked at a drugstore at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Laurel Street, chauffeured “two old ladies” and worked at a check booth on the exposition grounds in Balboa Park. The year was 1935.
Whenever time allowed, he went to the Old Globe Theatre to watch a professional acting troupe perform 50-minute versions of Shakespeare’s plays.
Two years later, Noel made his acting debut at the Old Globe. Except for a brief stint in Hollywood and military service during World War II, Noel never left. He became director, then artistic director and guiding light.
In 1981, having reached retirement age, Noel picked his own successor, Jack O’Brien. Still, Noel did not leave. He, O’Brien and managing director Thomas Hall formed a unique triumvirate that thrived for many years.
Noel’s long and singular life of devotion to theatrical arts and to the Old Globe deserve the National Medal of Arts.
“You ask if I had any idea where the Globe was going at the beginning,” Noel said in a circa 1995 interview with this writer. “I didn’t know the exact course it was going to take. The optimism of youth being what it was, I thought I would be a movie star by the time I was 22, which is pretty old when you’re 18.
“People are continually surprised when they ask that question to hear me say, ‘Yes, I did know. Yes, I did believe.’ Yes, I did work hard because I thought I knew where the Globe was going and what it could be. If you don’t have any idea where the theater could go, you meander, and you don’t make the commitment to the institution.”
Thanks, Craig, for a lifetime of commitment. You always had our medals and our devotion.
Charlene Baldridge, who can’t remember when she first met Noel, is a member of the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle.
Her first experience of the Old Globe was Captain’s Paradise in 1962.