CLEAR THE RUNWAY FOR ‘LITTLE PRINCE’

Roll out a little red carpet for “The Little Prince.” With David Morse (“St. Elsewhere”) in the lead, Antoine de Saint Exupery’s classic tale about a stranded aviator befriending a young boy/extraterrestrial in the Sahara arrives Tuesday at the Cast Theater in Hollywood.

“We (Boston Repertory Theatre) first did it in 1971,” said producer Esquire Jauchem, who has been with the work through five years of repertory at Boston and subsequent incarnations in San Francisco--and this time will also take the director’s reins. “David Zucker had adapted and directed it as his graduate project at Brandeis. I saw it, loved it, produced it.”

Since then, others have tried to find the winning combination. At one time, another producer got the rights to do a Broadway musical, which never opened. Said Jauchem, “It’s a small, intimate story. To blow it up to Broadway proportions just didn’t work.” (Also, Stanley Donen directed a Lerner and Loewe musical version for the screen in 1974.)

Over the long haul, the producer/director (whose New York-based lighting company did the designs for “Les Miserables” and Lily Tomlin’s “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe”) swears he has never tired of the piece.

“I’m always finding new nuances . . . it draws you in, seems so simple. But then it takes you on twists and turns, down paths you don’t expect--and suddenly you’re dealing with some heavy stuff.”

Not to mention controversial.

“There are all kinds of philosophies about it,” he said. “There are those who think it’s a Christ parable. Some say the relationship between the aviator and the boy has homosexual overtones. I don’t happen to believe either. I think the play deals with love, friendship, the need to make contact with each other. But it’s not a children’s show. We don’t even recommend children under 8 come to see it--because of some discussion of death. The best thing is for parents and kids to see it together.”

As for his star: “David was a member of our company in Boston; he originally played the fox. Now he’s old enough to play the aviator.”

Another classic awaits at the Grove Shakespeare Festival, where festival artistic director Thomas F. Bradac is staging Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” opening Friday.

“I started thinking about the play last October,” Bradac said. “Generally, it’s done fairly lightly; I saw it as a far more serious piece. There are lots of allusions to love, but it starts out with conflict. Hermia has to marry someone she doesn’t love or be sent to a convent--or killed. Other productions have glossed over that darker aspect. I thought it was important that it starts in disharmony and ends in bliss/nirvana.”

Also important to Bradac was the presence of animals and fairies (who originate in the woods) and the juxtaposition of the physical and spiritual. “It’s all there in the text,” he said. “So the fairies exist in both a physical state--as lizards and insects--and in a spiritual state. And they transform in front to the audience. I hope when people see it, they buy that leap. If they do, it all falls together.”

LATE CUES: New from the comedy/improv Groundlings troupe: “976-Groundlings,” opening Saturday. Included in the revue: “The Fawn Hall Lingerie Collection,” the gladiator demi-epic “Pectorus” and the backstage goings-on of “A Temply Play Production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ ”

Joan Ravenna’s “A Brush With Fate” (billed as “a comedic romp highlighting the lives of some of this city’s most memorable art connoisseurs”) opens Friday, as a visiting production at West Coast Ensemble. . . . Actor Sab Shimono is serving as fund-raiser/spokesman in the East West Players’ bid to buy and renovate the abandoned Union Church building downtown. Information: (213) 660-0366.

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: Charles Gordone’s powerful and Pulitzer Prize-winning “No Place to Be Somebody” (1969) opened last month at the Matrix to powerful reviews.

Said The Times’ Sylvie Drake: “It is precisely because this playwright is not afraid to see life through the very wide lens of a very candid camera that ‘No Place,’ for all its overt histrionics and blatant melodrama, achieves and retains the stature that it does. It is, as it was, a vividly expressed adventure story, enhanced by the playwright’s clear-eyed vision of life as he saw it.”

From Daily Variety’s Mick Cambridge: “Director Bill Duke has taken Gordone’s gripping three-act story and reproduced it faithfully, letting its salient view of race relations speak for itself. Result is a splendid, pertinent revival whose acting stands up to its message. . . . (Actor Franklyn Seales) operates as the play’s spiritual center, opening each act with short, brilliantly delivered soliloquies.”

Wrote Ed Kaufman in the Hollywood Reporter: “Gordone sees things straight-on, but without the detachment of the historian or the distortion of the politician. Gordone as playwright is politician, poet and moralist as he engages us in a play that’s full of rage, wit and ultimate dignity. And that applies to attitudes about blacks as well as whites.”

And from the Herald Examiner’s Richard Stayton: “Not for nothing is this an Actors for Themselves production. There are sizzling monologues, heartbreaking confessions, guns and switch-blades, sex and scandal. There is altogether too much happening for a stage to believably contain without contrivance. But when the cast is this fine, plot becomes a minor issue. If the play’s not there, let ‘em play!”