Grove Festival Will Fill Its ‘Midsummer’s Eve’ With Stars

The Grove Shakespeare Festival has lined up enough celebrity actors for its midsummer outdoor fund-raiser to call it “Shakespeare Under the Hollywood Stars.”

Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham (“Amadeus”) and Tony-winning actress Maryann Plunkett (“Me and My Girl”) have agreed to appear Aug. 10 at the Grove’s Festival Amphitheatre along with John Vickery (currently starring in “Richard II” at the Mark Taper Forum) and David Birney and Joan Van Ark, among others, W. Stuart McDowell, the Grove’s recently appointed artistic director, said Wednesday.

The one-night benefit performance, actually titled “Shakespeare Under the Stars: A Midsummer’s Eve III,” has been postponed from a previously announced date of July 27.

What all the performers have in common, McDowell said, is that at one time or other each has worked at the New York Shakespeare Festival for the late theater impresario Joseph Papp.

Although the benefit is intended to raise funds for the Grove, it will be dedicated to Papp and will include excerpts from shows he produced, among them the Broadway musicals “Hair,” “A Chorus Line” and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

Additionally, McDowell, who was scheduled to direct “The Merry Wives of Windsor” this summer in the amphitheater, has hired Gloria Skurski, his wife, to stage the outdoor production instead. It will run from Sept. 2 to 26.

McDowell said Tuesday he withdrew because he wants to “focus on positioning the company in the community.” Directing “Wives,” he said, would break the momentum of “networking with politicians, educators, corporate heads and other people in the community.”

In 1977, Skurski co-founded the Riverside Shakespeare Company in New York with McDowell. She directed “five or six comedies there,” he said, before she left several years later to become a television producer at CBS News.

McDowell said Skurski would be paid $4,200 under the usual terms of Grove contracts for guest directors in the amphitheater. According to his own contract as artistic director, McDowell would not have earned any additional fee for directing the show himself.

Skurski is the second female director McDowell has drafted this season. He recently hired Susan Atkinson to stage a revival of “The Fantasticks” at the Grove’s Gem Theatre on July 8 to Aug 8. Atkinson runs a theater in Bucks County, Pa.