‘Christmas’ May Bypass the Grove : Theater: Shakespeare troupe doesn’t seem to want to produce Dylan Thomas holiday classic. Laguna Beach company’s eager to.

GroveShakespeare, which announced last week that it would do Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” as its 1993 holiday show for an eighth consecutive year in Garden Grove, may not produce the show after all.

This development comes partly because of the Grove’s surprising reluctance to renew the rights, partly because it still owes royalties on the show and partly because of another company’s eagerness to stage the show in or near Orange County.

What makes the Grove’s phlegmatic interest surprising is that “A Child’s Christmas” has been both a cash cow and a sacred cow for years. The financially troubled theater company has depended on the profitable show not only as a reliable source of income, but also as a perennial source of community goodwill because of its popularity with family audiences.

“We have the amateur rights,” Bradford Mosley of High Octane Productions, a Laguna Beach-based company, claimed Tuesday. “And we’re negotiating the professional rights. It all depends on the venue we go into. We’re thinking of the Cerritos Performing Arts Center. That would be one possible professional arrangement.”

Victor Gotesman, general manager of the Cerritos Center, said Thursday that nobody has contacted him about booking the show there.

Mosley said he expects to know next week whether High Octane would obtain professional rights to “A Child’s Christmas.” If so, High Octane would have the exclusive right to stage the show within a 50-mile radius. If it obtains amateur rights only, other productions could run concurrently.

“For an amateur production, we would go into Brea or La Habra for a four-to-six week run,” Mosley said.

The Illinois-based Dramatic Publishing Co., which licenses the “Child’s Christmas” stage adaptation used by the Grove, confirmed that High Octane had applied for the rights but would not say whether they had been granted. Margie Murray, who handles professional licensing for the publisher, also also confirmed that the Grove has not shown an interest in renewing the rights.

The Grove’s artistic director, Stuart McDowell, acknowledged earlier this week what has been widely known in the local acting community: Many members of the Grove company do not want to do “A Child’s Christmas” again. McDowell said he is not against it.

McDowell confirmed Thursday that the Grove owes $2,200 in royalties from last December’s show and that he was told the show would not be available to the Grove this year on an exclusive basis, as it had been in the past.

“Non-exclusivity would be part of the reason for not doing ‘A Child’s Christmas,’ ” McDowell added. “There are a lot of other wonderful seasonal properties out there that the company would have an interest in doing.”

Asked to rate the chance of seeing a 1993 Grove production of “A Child’s Christmas” in the Gem Theatre, McDowell said it was slightly better than even. “It’s 60-40 we’ll do it,” he said.

Ironically, last December’s production at the Gem inspired High Octane’s Mosley to seek the rights.

“I saw it there,” he said, “and I have a real love for the show. I want to make sure that, come hell or high water, it goes on.”

Mosley, 33, who describes himself as a former investment banker in the entertainment industry, said “A Child’s Christmas” would be High Octane’s first stage venture if it obtained the rights.

Mosley said High Octane is also engaged on two other projects: “Superbike,” an independent movie about a young boy’s bicycle fantasy, which is now in pre-production, and “Darling, Wendy,” a Broadway-style musical based on J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan.”

Mosely expects the musical to be capitalized at $5 million, though no money has yet been raised. He also said he was “in talks” with actor David Birney about producing a national tour of Birney’s play, “Adam and Eve,” based on writings by Mark Twain.

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