FESTIVAL WARY OF STATUS QUO

The Grove Shakespeare Festival has come a long way since it opened in 1979 with a two-week run of “Romeo and Juliet.”

Now in its ninth season, the outdoor festival, launched through a creative partnership between the Grove Theatre Company, the City of Garden Grove and Rancho Santiago College, has presented a summerlong program since 1980.

The playbills have run the gamut, from “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Henry IV,” “As You Like It” and “Hamlet” to this year’s productions of “Julius Caesar” (opening today) and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” This summer’s festival also will perform Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid” from July 24 through Aug. 15.

The Grove Shakespeare Festival is one of the few annual festivals in the state, and in recent years has joined the acclaimed Old Globe Theatre program in San Diego as one of the two regularly offered in Southern California. More often than not, the Grove’s Shakespeare productions have been praised by Southern California critics.

“We’ve done a pretty good job of bringing Shakespeare to the area,” said Thomas Bradac, the festival’s managing director. “We get people coming in from out of state even, so we’re pretty happy.”

Happy, but not necessarily satisfied, Bradac said. “Because you’re offering an art form, you can never be too satisfied.”

The festival began in 1979 when Bradac, artistic director of the Grove Theatre Company, approached Garden Grove with the plan. The program, he argued, would gain recognition for the city by giving it an artsy cachet not often associated with Orange County. The City Council agreed, and since then, the festival has become an annual happening.

As in the past, the city, the theater troupe and Rancho Santiago College have joined this year in funding the festival’s $300,000 budget, Bradac said. The community college’s drama department also assists in most of the shows.

But while the organizers are pleased with the Shakespeare Festival’s successes, Bradac said there is room for improvement, or at least changes.

For one thing, he said, festival organizers expect to sign a regular contract with the stage actors’ union, which they expect will expand the pool of professional actors they can draw from. Currently, many of the actors appearing in the festival belong to the actors’ union, but some are amateurs.

Bradac also would like to revamp sections of the amphitheater’s stage to “make it more flexible, to handle more things we’d like to do with productions.” Likewise, the backstage area could use some reorganizing, he said.

Eventually, too, Bradac said the festival hopes to offer more plays--and not just those by Shakespeare. One idea is to expand, and slightly change, the existing format (of two or three Shakespeare plays and one work by another classic playwright, such as this year’s production of Moliere) by offering contemporary playwrights alongside the Bard, he said. An expanded schedule would mean that the festival would run more nights each week than the current Thursday-through-Sunday schedule.

In conjunction with the performances, festival organizers said they also would like to present lectures on the plays and playwrights at the Grove Theatre Company’s resident house, the nearby Gem Theatre, Bradac said.

“We’re looking at these developments during the next few years,” he said. “We’re very optimistic about the things that we can do.”