THEATER AND FILM / Herman Wong : ‘Lion in Winter’ Returns Rowe to Ermine as Playhouse Nears ‘Second Stage’ Dream

Excuse the old cliches, but March is coming in like a lion for Douglas Rowe, the Laguna Playhouse’s veteran artistic director.

For one thing, March provides an actor’s field day for Rowe. He is playing the tired but still roaring royal paterfamilias, England’s Henry II, in a revival of “The Lion in Winter” that will open Thursday at the playhouse’s Moulton Theatre.

“It’s a terrific role--larger-than-life complexities and such marvelous lines--the kind you’d kill for,” said Rowe last week at rehearsal, looking very leonine in his kingly robes, a far cry from the unsavory characters he has played in such recent movies as “In the Mood” and “Critters II.”

For another, the Laguna Playhouse is closer than ever to Rowe-the-producer’s longtime dream: Establishing an offbeat “second stage” program with a professional troupe, while continuing the usual community-theater offerings at the 418-seat Moulton.

How close? Only last week, the Laguna Beach Planning Commission approved a conditional use permit allowing the playhouse to lease a vacant downtown building for the 225-seat “second stage” and allied facilities. If the project gets clearance from the California Coastal Commission, the playhouse hopes to start the first season of “second stage” plays this fall.

“We’re keeping our fingers crossed,” said Rowe, 50, who plans to cast the “second stage” productions mostly with Equity actors. “We’ve waited a long time for this (facility), and it will give us the more choice, well-rounded (theater) menu that this community deserves.”

For years now, Rowe has been the guiding artistic chef at the Laguna Playhouse, the county’s oldest theater organization.

Yet Rowe, who was a drama major at Maine’s Bates College, discovered the county’s seaside art colony rather serendipitously, to say the least.

The only reason he chose to seek his fame and fortune in Los Angeles rather than New York was because of the Dodgers. “L.A. is where the (Brooklyn) Dodgers had moved,” said Rowe, who was also a star baseball player in college and an avid Dodgers fan. “So naturally, I went West.”

When he made it to Laguna Beach in 1962, it was love at first sight. “It was the beaches, the small-town setting, the Laguna serenity,” remembered Rowe, whose first trek to the town was to audition for a part in the Laguna Playhouse’s “The Happy Time.”

Not only did Rowe get the part, but two years later he was hired as the playhouse’s top administrator. He ran an organization that included two fledgling actors, Mike Farrell and Harrison Ford, and a booster corps that included another then-resident of Laguna, Bette Davis.

Rowe deserted Laguna Beach in the late 1960s to try the big-time circuit. TV roles included Jack Benny’s hippie chauffeur and appearances in national commercials. In New York, he won featured roles in stage works produced by such luminaries as Joseph Papp and Eva Le Gallienne.

By the mid-1970s, Rowe was back in Laguna Beach, lured in large part by expansions at the Laguna Playhouse, which had moved from its small Ocean Avenue home to the larger, newly built Moulton Theatre off Laguna Canyon Road.

Rowe, who again took over as artistic administrator in 1976, said he has never regretted the move back. “The playhouse was growing up fast--the (artistic) opportunities were greater than ever,” said Rowe, who has since staged such works as “The Petrified Forest,” “St. Joan,” “Terra Nova” and last fall’s musical, “1776.”

National recognition came last year, when the playhouse’s production of “Quilters,” the frontier musical saga, walked off with top honors at the national finals of the American Assn. of Community Theatres Festival.

Rowe-the-actor still makes the Hollywood circuit now and then. While his conventional looks keep him from “matinee idol” roles, Rowe has had a wide range of characters in theatrical and TV movies. He is a heroic detective in “A Measure of Fear” and an overwrought Little League coach in “Run Till You Fall,” as well as the sleazy rabbit-breeder of “In the Mood” and drunken shopkeeper of “Critters II.”

His range has been even more dramatic at the Laguna Playhouse--from the nebbish hero of “Play It Again, Sam” to the egomaniac great actor of “Kean.” And now “The Lion in Winter,” the James Goldman play about squabbles in the 12th-Century household of the aging Henry II.

There’s a footnote. This isn’t the first time Rowe has played this English monarch. A decade ago, he played the younger Henry in Jean Anouilh’s “Becket,” also at the Laguna Playhouse, also under director Marthella Randall.