Mandell Will Play King Lear for SOC

Alan Mandell, one of the premiere classical actors in Southern California, has agreed to star in “King Lear” for Shakespeare Orange County next summer.

The tragedy, being staged by SOC founding artistic director Thomas F. Bradac, will open in August, the second of two plays scheduled for the troupe’s 1994 summer season at Chapman University’s Waltmar Theatre here. “Twelfth Night” will launch the season--the third by the county’s only professional classical company--in June. Dates have yet to be announced.

“Tom and I talked about it, and I’m committed to doing ‘Lear’ with him,” Mandell, 65, said Wednesday from his home in Los Angeles. “I am certainly prepared for it.”

Last summer, Mandell signed to star in “Lear” for GroveShakespeare in Garden Grove, but just days before the production was to open, the company collapsed financially. “That time I got to a first run-through,” Mandell said. “This time I’m hoping to get all the way through.”

Ironically, SOC had announced “King Lear” for last summer, but when the Grove subsequently announced that it would do “Lear” with Mandell, Bradac decided to drop the play and substituted “Julius Caesar.”

“I basically stepped aside,” Bradac recalled Wednesday. “There was no point in having two productions of the same play. So this has been on the burner for me for two years.” Bradac said he offered Mandell the role when the actor came to see SOC’s production of “Julius Caesar,” after the Grove’s collapse.

Both artists have worked together and have known each other for years. “The first show I ever did at the Grove was with Tom directing,” Mandell said.

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Mandell played Shylock in a widely praised production of “The Merchant of Venice” staged by Bradac at the Grove in 1991, shortly before he was ousted by the Grove’s board of trustees from his post as artistic director there.

Bradac, who had founded the Grove more than a decade earlier, launched SOC in 1992 with several members of the Grove company who defected to protest his ouster.

Mandell leaves for Paris next week to appear in Reza Abdoh’s “The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice” at the Paris Festival. He said his only other plans before “Lear” will be to direct Mayo Simon’s “The Old Lady’s Guide to Survival” in New York next spring.