Westside revival in two acts

THE new impresarios in town aim to prove that somebody besides the Nederlander Organization can do Broadway-level commercial theater in L.A. and make it pay. But they aren’t being brash about it.

After 30 years of producing shows and running the smallest theater on Broadway, the Helen Hayes, Martin Markinson knows better than to trumpet and crow before most of the seats have been sold for his latest venture -- the tandem operation of the Brentwood and Wadsworth theaters on the Veterans Affairs medical campus in West Los Angeles. More than once, Markinson has put serious money into a play, only to see it die on opening night.

His younger business partner, Richard Willis, has learned the hard way that life’s touchdown passes can be dropped in the end zone. It happened in 1990, against Yale, when he was quarterback for a Brown University varsity football team that won just four games in his two years as the starter. By then, he had dispensed with any notion that he might one day fill the spikes of Dan Marino, Joe Montana or even Dieter Brock. He caught the theater bug as a freshman and dreamed instead of performing, directing or producing the plays of Edward Albee, Sam Shepard and John Guare.

Markinson and Willis think they have the right timing and a winning strategy for turning the Brentwood and the Wadsworth, two aged but now restored theaters, into a diversified performing arts center for the Westside. But in their business, they’ll tell you, there are no sure bets.

“We know the shows we have are good, but that doesn’t necessarily make it successful,” Markinson says. “It seems to be working, but this is a pretty big test for us.”

The beginnings of an answer will emerge during a four-month opening gambit scheduled to start Jan. 23 with “Jay Johnson: The Two and Only!” a one-man show at the 499-seat Brentwood by a former cast member of the satiric 1970s television series “Soap.” Johnson’s show about the art and lore of ventriloquism played off-Broadway in 2004 and won glowing notices from New York critics. Eve Ensler arrives at the 1,378-seat Wadsworth on Feb. 1 for a two-week stand with “The Good Body,” her one-woman sequel to the feminist phenomenon “The Vagina Monologues.”

Two comedies at the Brentwood by unknowns, seen only in Florida -- where Markinson until recently ran the Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale -- round out the partners’ first sequence of theater offerings. Also on the agenda are “Reel Talk,” a Monday night series at the Wadsworth that screens and discusses new films on the eve of their release, as well as concerts by the Thousand Oaks-based New West Symphony.

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A whole new game

THINGS were not so promising in the mid-1990s, when Markinson and Willis first visited the Brentwood and found that it housed a veterans’ bingo game. Built in 1942, the theater had a flat, concrete floor with no rise to it, so playgoers -- and professional plays were seldom done there -- would be forced to crane their necks to see past obstructing heads. For $2.5 million in mostly borrowed money, the partners have added a gradual 8-foot rise from stage-front to back row, installed carpeting and made interior and exterior restorations, complete with Art Deco light fixtures and gold trim.

An additional $1.5 million has gone into the Wadsworth, built in 1939 and familiar to many from its past use in UCLA’s performing arts series. Special attention has gone to improving the hall’s famously drab acoustics. The 20-year lease that the partners, doing business as RichMark Entertainment, signed with the VA in 2004 also gives them the franchise to book pop concerts and host film premieres and social functions in the theaters and elsewhere on VA grounds.

Markinson is a lean and tanned 74-year-old who is ever-alert to openings for a wry quip. He grew up in Brooklyn, made a nice pile in the insurance business, then ran away as a middle-aged man to join the showbiz circus. He began producing Broadway plays in 1975 and bought the 597-seat Helen Hayes in 1979.

Willis, 38, is earnest and friendly, with a husky build and an open face under long, tousled red hair. Raised in Texas, he landed in L.A. in the early 1990s and became involved with its 99-seat theater scene. After discovering the Brentwood, he decided that, with a little fixing up, it would make a nice home for a grass-roots theater company.

His ambitions grew after he met Markinson while playing a part in “Snitch,” a 1996 cop movie directed by Markinson’s son, Keith. Markinson says he didn’t need much persuading to see the synergistic possibilities in operating the Brentwood and Helen Hayes in tandem. Shows bound for Broadway could get a shakedown in L.A. (“The Two and Only!” is an example; after its run at the Brentwood, it will open at the Helen Hayes), and shows with a buzz from Broadway could capitalize on the good vibe with an L.A. staging (after playing two years at the Helen Hayes, Markinson brought Tovah Feldshuh’s one-woman show, “Golda’s Balcony,” to the Wadsworth for a short run, in a co-production with the Geffen Playhouse).

The partners’ plans began to take shape in 1999. UCLA had pulled out of the Wadsworth, and the two won a five-year lease to run and upgrade what Markinson recalls as “a dingy theater that nobody wanted to go to.” The Brentwood was on their radar as a longer-range project. As resources allowed, they would gradually outfit it as a proper theater.

Events accelerated their plans. The 2,100-seat Shubert Theatre in Century City closed in January 2002, when the Shubert Organization was unable to renew its lease with owners who wanted to redevelop the site. In 2004, another Westside commercial-theater institution, the 382-seat Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills, was knocked down to make way for a hotel. The niche Markinson and Willis saw for a midsized commercial house on the Westside was turning into a good-sized gap.

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Right time, right place

MEANWHILE, the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood was about to undergo renovations and needed a temporary, single-season home for 2004-05. To accommodate the Geffen, RichMark hastened remodeling of the Brentwood, using a combination of borrowed money and rent paid by the Geffen to complete a planned 2 1/2 -year project in 10 months. The Geffen’s tenancy afforded a five-show shakedown for the VA venues and exposed them to thousands of theatergoers.

“We did them a good service,” says Gilbert Cates, the Geffen’s producing director. “The [Brentwood] is terrific and comfortable, and I have nothing but high marks to give it.” The Geffen is a short drive east of the VA campus, but Cates doesn’t see the Brentwood as competition. As commercial operators, Markinson and Willis can’t afford to be too daring; art is nice, but the point of each show is to make money. Nonprofit theaters such as the Geffen and Center Theatre Group have donors who float considerable chunks of their budget and subscribers who in theory, are attuned to a mix of unproven new plays and classic revivals along with more popular fare.

“A lot of nonprofits do very artsy stuff, because it doesn’t matter if they make money,” Markinson says. “We’d better do something where we can entice people to come.”

The Nederlander Organization, which owns nine Broadway theaters and produces numerous shows, operates under the same profit imperatives, but on a bigger scale that may minimize competition with RichMark. Its L.A. venue is the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, with 2,703 seats; it also has preferred-tenant status for about three more years at the 1,953-seat Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills, which Nederlander recently sold to Temple Shalom of the Arts, a synagogue that aims to program and refurbish the Wilshire as a cultural center for concerts, lectures and events promoting understanding among L.A.’s diverse ethnic groups.

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Stage synergy

THE RichMark partners and Martin Wiviott, who runs Nederlander’s Broadway/L.A. series, agree that they are likely to operate on different levels, with Nederlander going after the large-scale musicals that are Broadway’s meat, and the VA theaters concentrating on what Markinson and Willis hope will be savory side dishes: plays and small-scale musicals.

“It doesn’t impact us at all,” Wiviott says, before repeating a theatrical commonplace: More shows playing in town means more excitement generated, and the rising tide lifts all rafters.

“We welcome them,” concurs Charles Dillingham, managing director of Center Theatre Group, which includes the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre at the downtown Music Center and the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. “The more first-class activity there is, the more it stimulates audiences to get in the habit of going to theater, and we all benefit.”

Willis acknowledges that he and Markinson will at least occasionally bid for shows against the other major venues, both nonprofit and commercial. The renewal of the theaters on VA grounds also promises to intensify what Gordon Davidson, former artistic director of Center Theatre Group, says has been a growing concern: theater lovers on the Westside choosing alternatives close to home rather than fighting traffic to make an 8 p.m. curtain at the Taper or Ahmanson.

However the competitive or synergistic consequences shake out, Markinson and Willis expect that success will require patience and a long-term effort.

“Nothing works the first year,” says Markinson, who probably could give a seminar on the virtues of theatrical persistence: During the 1981-82 Broadway season, the Helen Hayes hosted three straight flops that closed after one, 32 and four performances, respectively. The next show, Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy,” ran for nearly three years and won Markinson a best-play Tony Award as co-producer.

With an eye toward the future, the RichMark partners have planned workshop readings in New York City this month of two scripts they’d like to produce on Broadway and at the Brentwood. “A Matter of Honor” is by Michael Chepiga, whose “Getting and Spending” was produced on Broadway by Markinson and is being made into a film starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. Markinson says that “Retrospective,” by Joan Tewksbury, will star Kathleen Chalfant and Harris Yulin as artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her lover and mentor, photographer Alfred Stieglitz -- “if the piece works.”

If everything on the VA campus comes together perfectly, Willis says, RichMark will mine new theater fans by promoting its stage offerings to the movie-buff and celebrity crowds that come to Brentwood for the film series and Hollywood premieres on the VA campus. That would be a touchdown for the entire theater scene: theater’s chief business challenge, nationwide, is augmenting a graying audience that grew up watching plays with younger generations who were raised on film and television and haven’t gotten the stage habit.

“We’re hoping we can capitalize” on the chance to pitch plays to filmgoers, Willis says, but he isn’t making any swaggering claims or predictions. “We don’t know if it’s going to work or not.”

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Coming attractions

RichMark Entertainment is planning a mix of theater, dance, music and other cultural offerings at its two theaters in West Los Angeles, the Wadsworth and the Brentwood, as well as on its Broadway stage, the Helen Hayes Theatre. Here’s what’s on tap.

L.A. theater

“Jay Johnson: The Two and Only!”

Brentwood Theatre

Opens: Jan. 23

Ends: Feb. 19

This comic solo show recounts Johnson’s long obsession with ventriloquism and gives insights into the history and craft of his art.

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“The Good Body”

Wadsworth Theatre

Opens: Feb. 1

Ends: Feb. 12

Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues,” returns in the Los Angeles debut of her one-woman show about how women view their bodies.

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“My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy”

Brentwood Theatre

Opens: March 15

Ends: April 9

If you couldn’t score tickets for Billy Crystal, Steve Solomon offers another solo comic turn about the family, playing multiple characters to animate his own growing-up story.

**

“Crush the Infamous Thing: The Adventures of the Hollywood Four”

Brentwood Theatre

Opens: To be determined; previews begin April 18

Ends: May 16

The West Coast premiere of a screwball comedy about four 1930s movie actors who become murder suspects and have to solve the disappearance of their missing producer.

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Nontheater

Reel Talk With Stephen Farber

Wadsworth Theatre

A Monday night film series

beginning Feb. 6.

New West Symphony

Wadsworth Theatre

March 9, April 6

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On Broadway

“Bridge & Tunnel”

Helen Hayes Theatre

Opens: Jan. 26

Ends: March 12

Writer-performer Sarah Jones brings her one-woman show to Broadway, playing more than a dozen characters from New York’s unfashionable outer boroughs -- the “bridge and tunnel” crowd.