Grove Festival Finds Managing Director : Theater: Barbara G. Hammerman, an insider, is named to succeed Richard A. Stein, who is taking over Laguna Playhouse.

GARDEN GROVE —  The Grove Shakespeare Festival has named an insider, Barbara G. Hammerman, to replace departing managing director Richard A. Stein, who was hired earlier this month as chief executive of the Laguna Playhouse.

Hammerman will take over the management of the county’s third-largest nonprofit theater operation--and the second-leading professional troupe after South Coast Repertory--in the newly created position of executive vice president.

Hammerman said Wednesday that she will give up her unpaid post as president-elect of the Grove board of directors but will retain a seat on the board in her paid managerial job. Stein was not a member of the board. However, his job was full time. Hers is not--at least officially--though her undisclosed salary is expected to match Stein’s, she said, because “I am assuming the same duties.”

The 42-year-old Yorba Linda resident will be responsible for the Grove’s financial management, fund raising, marketing and public relations. She said she anticipates putting in “at least 30 hours a week and probably a lot more” at the theater, while also retaining “a working relationship” with the Tustin-based Community Foundation of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, which she has headed since June 1986 as executive director.

“I think it’s going to be great,” she said of her new appointment, which takes effect March 5. “I think the answer to whether (having two jobs) will succeed will come in the proof of the work.”

Thomas F. Bradac, the Grove’s artistic director, said he is “extremely pleased” by the board’s decision to hire from within, comparing Hammerman’s elevation and Stein’s departure to “a baseball trade” in which “both teams did well.”

“My concern was that getting somebody from the outside would take a three- to six-month search,” Bradac said. “Breaking in that person in terms of learning the ropes in the county would have taken another nine months. Barbara already knows everybody in the county. She is well connected. She knows where the money is. She knows who’s giving and who’s not.”

Hammerman, who holds a law degree, was responsible for fund development and grant programs at the Community Foundation, which has assets of almost $5 million, in addition to executive management. She has been a publicly elected member of the board of trustees of the North Orange County Community College District since 1983.

A native of Baton Rouge, La., Hammerman has an undergraduate degree in theater arts from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, La., where she grew up. She is married and has a 14-year-old daughter.

To adjust for the somewhat unusual, part-time arrangement at the Grove, she said she will collaborate with three outside consultants:

* Judith Rosenthal, a certified public accountant from Laguna Beach and former chief financial officer of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, who will assist with fiscal management.

* Dede Ginter of Ginter & Assoc., a public relations firm in Fullerton, who will assist with promotion.

* Patti Negrino, a marketing executive from Garden Grove, who will assist with marketing and development.

The 11-year-old Grove Shakespeare Festival, which has projected a 1990 operating budget of $700,000, will produce a six-play, indoor-outdoor season from May to December at the 178-seat Gem Theatre and the 550-seat Festival Amphitheatre. Last year it had 2,600 subscribers.