Donations Save Grove Shakespeare Festival

The death warrant for the current season of the cash-starved Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove has been revoked because of new donations, including a $10,000 anonymous gift, jubilant theater officials said Tuesday.

The Grove, which recently canceled Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” due to a lack of funds, will mount the annual Yuletide production at the Gem Theatre from Nov. 30 to Dec. 30.

“We got an anonymous gift from a woman who is a lover of Shakespeare,” said Dede Ginter, a spokeswoman for Orange County’s second-largest professional troupe. “She doesn’t want her name out and she doesn’t live in Garden Grove. She just thinks it was terrible that we would have to cancel. So she sent us a check for $10,000.”

Ginter said the woman described herself as “not a wealthy woman.”

That gift, combined with $3,500 given by the Garden Grove Firefighters on Sunday and a corporate donation of $6,000 to be made official tomorrow by the Hyatt Regency Alicante hotel in Garden Grove, provided the funds that theater officials said were needed to mount the show.

“We got a call from the Alicante the other day asking, ‘How much do you need?’ ” Ginter said. “We said we had been able to raise a total of $15,200 with other smaller donations and that we needed $6,000 to make $21,200. They said, ‘You’ve got it.’ ”

Ginter said the other donations included $1,000 from the city’s Chamber of Commerce, $500 from the Kiwanis Club and $200 from the Emblem Club.

The gifts and the decision to mount “A Child’s Christmas” follows a recent series of rebuffs by the City Council--the latest on Sept. 24--which denied several requests by theater officials for an infusion of emergency funds to close out the season as scheduled.

The council did provide $7,248 on Sept. 11 to pay immediate bills in response to the Grove’s first request for $32,500. But that cash reprieve was given grudgingly and only after engendering an acrimonious debate that cast serious doubt on the theater’s future in Garden Grove.

“We’re thrilled that we’re going to be able to mount the show,” Grove artistic director Thomas F. Bradac said on Tuesday. “Nobody ever wants to shut down a season. It’s the last thing in the world we ever wanted to do.”

Bradac noted that the Grove crisis “was real” and that once the news of its “last-ditch” request of the council had been publicized “other avenues (of contributed income) opened up.”