Gregory Mortensen

Gregory Mortensen, the playwright, cast a pitying eye on Gregory Mortensen, the actor. He had just agreed to take over the lead in "The Scoundrel"--his adaptation of Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist"--with just seven days to rehearse for tonight's premiere at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove. "The irony is that when I was writing the thing," he said, "I kept thinking, 'Some poor bastard is going to have to memorize all these lines.' Well, now it's me, and it feels like I'm about to give birth."

Gregory Mortensen, the playwright, cast a pitying eye on Gregory Mortensen, the actor. He had just agreed to take over the lead in "The Scoundrel"--his adaptation of Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist"--with just seven days to rehearse for tonight's premiere at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove. "The irony is that when I was writing the thing," he said, "I kept thinking, 'Some poor bastard is going to have to memorize all these lines.' Well, now it's me, and it feels like I'm about to give birth."

Coleridge said that watching Edmund Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. That's sort of the effect that Ashley Carr's condensation of "Hamlet" has at California Repertory Theatre. What Maurice Evans referred to as "the entirety Hamlet" was five hours long and answered all of the questions critics and scholars have posed ever since the play first was cut. But commerciality insists on brevity, even at the expense of richness and emotional depth.

With only a week to go until the first preview of "The Scoundrel" at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove, director Thomas F. Bradac has made a major cast change that could delay the official opening of the show. Bradac said Wednesday that playwright-actor Gregory Mortensen, who adapted the contemporary farce from Ben Jonson's Elizabethan comedy "The Alchemist," will take over the starring role from Marcus Smythe, an East Coast actor with New York and regional theater credits.

Director Chris Hart, Moss Hart's son, knows the nuts and bolts of his father's plays, along with their lightness and rhythms. He puts that knowledge to work in this energetic California Repertory production of "Light Up the Sky" at Cal State Long Beach. The world of the play is a special one, the microcosm of that once-dreaded theatrical event, a pre-Broadway opening night in Boston in 1950. It's a world that has been savaged, ridiculed and satirized by authors.

Director Chris Hart, Moss Hart's son, knows the nuts and bolts of his father's plays, along with their lightness and rhythms. He puts that knowledge to work in this energetic California Repertory production of "Light Up the Sky" at Cal State Long Beach. The world of the play is a special one, the microcosm of that once-dreaded theatrical event, a pre-Broadway opening night in Boston in 1950. It's a world that has been savaged, ridiculed and satirized by authors.

Coleridge said that watching Edmund Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. That's sort of the effect that Ashley Carr's condensation of "Hamlet" has at California Repertory Theatre. What Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans referred to as "the entirety Hamlet" was five hours long and answered all the questions critics and scholars have posed ever since the play first was cut. But commercialism insists on brevity, even at the expense of richness and emotional depth.

Shakespeare's primer on political power, "Richard II," opened the 10th Grove Shakespeare Festival on Saturday amid a demonstration of the importance of political power. In the wake of decisions by the Garden Grove City Council last week to grant only $20,000 of the Grove Theatre Company's request for a $53,000 advance on its 1988-89 city appropriation, artistic director Thomas F. Bradac and board member Robert Dunek appealed to the audience for contributions before the play began.

There's a certain amount of scenery chewing and some prefabricated swordplay here, but the Grove Shakespeare Festival, in its inaugural production of the eighth summer season, has a welcome "Henry IV, Part I" on its hands. It is fresh, exuberant and funny. Director Richard E. T.

Now that the season is upon us, we are being inundated with Christmases of all sorts, from Dickensian to Capotesque. How welcome, in the midst of them all, is the fresh breath of tingly, pine-scented air that comes with the California Repertory Company's holiday production--Howard Burman's adaptation of the stories that make up "An O. Henry Christmas." During the depression of 1893, some poor souls have gathered round a fire beneath a bridge in Manhattan.