Larger-Scale Venues Due for Westsiders

Lots of famous actors live in L.A.’s Westside and adjacent cities like Beverly Hills. Many of them want to do an occasional play but don’t want to commit to a long run away from home. Ergo, let them do plays on L.A.’s Westside. And watch their fans run to the box office.

This sums up a large part of the logic behind two projects that are gathering steam: the conversion of the 1,397-seat Wadsworth Theatre in Brentwood into a commercial theater, and the development of a Beverly Hills Cultural Center--of which the main attraction will be a 499-seat theater.

The Wadsworth is closer to fruition. Westsiders may think of the Wadsworth as a site for nonprofit, UCLA-sponsored arts events, but since last July the theater has been managed by Martin Markinson, owner of Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre and a commercial theater producer. Markinson declined to talk about the terms of his arrangement with the VA’s West Los Angeles Healthcare Center, of which the Wadsworth is a part, but The Times reported in January that he was paying $8,000 a month in rent plus an incentive based on ticket sales.

Markinson has presented a few concerts since he took over the Wadsworth, but he’s now planning his first run of a play: Arje Shaw’s “The Gathering,� starring Hal Linden, booked for February. A drama about a controversy during the Reagan years involving a Holocaust survivor and his son, “The Gathering� was developed off-Broadway and in Florida. Now Markinson hopes to take “The Gathering� to Broadway, with the Wadsworth run serving as part of a pre-Broadway tour.

The Wadsworth stage, backstage and overhead space are big enough for small musicals, Markinson said. And he believes that L.A., especially the Westside, has enough theatergoers to support relatively short engagements in a 1,400-seat house, but not long ones (the obvious exceptions are the big musicals that wouldn’t fit into the Wadsworth anyway). Markinson said he may do “seasons� of shows, but he doesn’t plan to sell them as subscription packages--at least not yet--because that would require the hiring of a large staff.

The most prominent commercial theater on the Westside, the larger Shubert Theatre, has been dark for more than a year. But the Shubert is too big for something like “The Gathering,� Markinson said. Then again, Annette Bening’s stint last year as “Hedda Gabler� at Westwood’s 497-seat Geffen Playhouse could have done well in a larger theater like the Wadsworth, he added. So he’s hoping to fill that gap between 500 and 2,200 seats with a theater that eliminates the need for Westside theatergoers to “run to the other side of the town�--where such theaters as the Mark Taper Forum, the Ahmanson and the Pasadena Playhouse already fill that gap.

Although hardly anyone thinks of the Wadsworth as a commercial venue, Markinson believes he can turn its image around, citing what he did at the Helen Hayes--which was “a dump,� used mainly as a TV studio, when he bought it 20 years ago and which now has “three or four shows waiting to come in,� he said.

Moving right along to Beverly Hills, this coming week will be a big one for the three finalists for the job of executive director of the city’s new cultural center, which will occupy a former post office on Crescent Drive. Final interviews are scheduled for Saturday, said Paul Selwyn, president of the Beverly Hills Cultural Foundation, the nonprofit that was awarded the lease on the city-owned property by the City Council on March 28.

The Beverly Hills project is at least two years away from an opening night, Selwyn said. A board of local luminaries has raised $6 million out of the estimated $20 million-plus that will be needed to transform the former post office. Once it’s up and running, Selwyn hopes it can be “close to self-supporting,� thanks to revenue from an on-site cafe, visitor center and store as well as the box office. However, “if there is any shortfall, the foundation will be there.�

Theater will be the cornerstone of the programming, Selwyn said. He anticipates four or five productions a year, probably imported from outside producers. Like Markinson, he believes that stars based in or near Beverly Hills “will be tickled to death to do a play here if it’s a closed-end commitment.� The city’s existing professional theaters, the commercial Canon and the nonprofit Theatre 40, have also indicated some interest in using the larger theater.

None of the finalists for the executive director job is from Beverly Hills, Selwyn said, but all are from Southern California, though he declined to identify them.

Meanwhile, James Blackman, who runs the Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities in Redondo Beach and the South Bay Playhouse in Hermosa Beach, said he has been encouraged by some of the Beverly Hills board members to look into the possibility of cooperative ventures between the two organizations. He’d like to do shows similar to those in Hermosa Beach, “but with a more sophisticated flair--some new plays, and we would make sure that Annette Bening is in something.�

Blackman spoke on behalf of the project in front of the Beverly Hills City Council, but later he said that the executive director job sounds like “a four-headed monster--an executive director, a managing director, an artistic director and a development director� and might not be a manageable position.

But here’s an idea: Offer the job to Bening. Apparently she can do no wrong in the eyes of Westside theatergoers.