Theatre

For a quarter of a century Otto Lowy was one of Vancouver's busiest stage directors, moving between serious drama, Broadway comedy, Viennese operetta and the big summer musicals under the stars in Stanley Park.

He began as an actor with the New Westminster Vagabond Players in 1950 and joined Vancouver Little Theatre, where he sat on the executive choosing the plays and was directing by 1953. When the Arts Club opened its first theatre in 1964 he was there from the start, and he went on to direct seventeen productions for it, most of them comedies, at its home on Seymour Street. In summer he staged the musicals of Theatre in the Park at the Malkin Bowl; in spring, operettas for the North Shore Light Opera Society, among them Kálmán and Offenbach, the composers he would later play on the radio.