Barry Tobias
Barry Tobias was practicing law in Los Angeles when opportunity knocked: he accompanied a group of high school drama students and their instructor on a six-week theatre tour of Europe, coordinating daily breakfast, lunch and dinner; private guided tours to historical landmarks; 28 theatre productions; and intimate discussions with local actors, directors and producers. Somewhere between Scotland and Switzerland, Break-Away Tours was born, and the Los Angeles Bar Association lost one of its finest.
Over the next 50 years, Barry has created hundreds of tours for dozens of schools and regional theatres. He has hosted tens of thousands of theatre lovers in Bath and Stratford, Dublin, Paris and Edinburgh – and especially in London and New York City, the theatre capitals of the English speaking world.
Barry received his BA in Psychology at UCLA and his Juris Doctorate at UC Hastings College of the Law. He and his wife, Christine, live in San Diego. Their oldest son, Alex, joined Break-Away Tours in 2013.
“As we find light at the end of the epidemic, we look forward to resuming our tours with the Lights of Broadway, our New Year’s Theatre Tour of NYC in late 2021. Then back to London and beyond in 2022. We hope you will join us in celebrating our 50th year.”
Alex Tobias
Alex Tobias boarded his first jet at four weeks of age, and he joined his first New York theatre tour as a six-month-old. Admittedly, he did miss the productions themselves that winter, but the tour set the stage for an upbringing full of adventure and live entertainment. His father, Barry Tobias, had established Break-Away Tours nearly two decades earlier. Travel and theatre are in his bones.
Theatre tours were the family’s business and everywhere in the family home. In his father’s den, the shelves on one wall were filled with books about people and places around the world; on another wall, playbills, memoirs and yards of volumes about theatre past and present. Actors, directors and producers joined the family at the dinner table.
Alex discovered a personal joy for theatre while attending Junior Theatre summer camps in San Diego. Besides exposure to world class theatre at The Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse and other local venues, he often joined his father to preview the latest shows on Broadway and London’s West End before assembling packages for the coming season’s tours.
Alex now has been planning and accompanying tours for over a decade, in the Break-Away tradition of highly personalized “Theatre Tours for Theatre People.” His goal is to eventually pry the reins of the business from his ebullient father.
Alex is a graduate of the University of Colorado, Boulder. He and his wife, Alanna, live in San Diego with their daughters, Blythe and Ivy.
“My number one priority is to ensure our patrons are enjoying themselves. It is an honor to have a career that lets me visit such amazing cities, witness such spectacular theatre, and meet so many wonderful people.”
