La Jolla Playhouse's 2026-2027 season will feature three world-premiere musicals—The Family Album, GRIM, and Particle Fever—as well as the West Coast premieres of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Purpose and Ngozi Anyanwu's The Monsters, and the world premiere of Mat Smart's A Black-billed Cuckoo.
The 2026-2027 subscription slate marks the final season curated by Tony winner Christopher Ashley, the Playhouse’s Artistic Director, who will depart the organization in January 2026 after nearly two decades, to lead New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company.
The world premiere of the new musical Particle Fever, based on the documentary film by Mark Levinson and David Kaplan, boasts a book by Tony winner David Henry Hwang, music and lyrics by Bear McCreary and Zoe Sarnak, and a story by all three. Leigh Silverman will direct the February-March 2027 engagement, which plans to hurtle audiences into the most ambitious experiment ever attempted when more than 10,000 scientists from around the world joined forces to build the Large Hadron Collider and solve one of the universe’s greatest mysteries.