Maybe P & T Could Shrink It

The Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills will house the new Broadway/L.A. play series, announced last week. Such a large space might work fine for the middle show on the list, Penn & Teller--who customarily play theaters of that size. But are the other two productions, “The Last Night of Ballyhoo” and “Picasso at the Lapin Agile”--both of them less presentational than Penn & Teller--too intimate for the Wilshire?

The show’s producers and the Nederlander Organization--which operates Broadway/L.A.--have foreseen that possibility. Of the Wilshire’s 1,900 seats, around 600 in the balcony will be blocked off by a curtain and won’t be used for the productions on the play series, said Martin Wiviott, Broadway/L.A. general manager.

Yet even at 1,300 seats, the Wilshire will still be more than twice as big as the Helen Hayes Theatre, where “Ballyhoo” is playing in New York, or L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse, where “Picasso” enjoyed a long 1994-95 run in the venue’s incarnation as the Westwood Playhouse. At 597 seats, the Helen Hayes is Broadway’s smallest theater, and the Geffen capacity is just under 500.

The Nederlander Organization leases the 800-seat Henry Fonda Theatre, across the street from its headquarters at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, and that’s where Nederlander presented “Ballyhoo” author Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy” in 1989. But playing the Fonda would require longer runs--and therefore greater costs, Wiviott said: “You can amortize your costs faster” in a larger theater.

Besides, said “Ballyhoo” co-producer Jane Harmon, the seven-actor “Ballyhoo” is a bigger play than the three-actor “Daisy,” in set as well as cast. The only reason it’s at the Helen Hayes is because “that was the only available [Broadway] house in February, and we wanted to open then in order to beat the pack before the spring.” It will play theaters that are even larger than the cut-back Wilshire elsewhere on its tour.

The Mark Taper Forum and the Geffen Playhouse are often interested in New York nonmusical hits, but Harmon said the Geffen is too small and anyway, the “Ballyhoo” producers didn’t want their play locked into a subscription slot: “Better to sell out for two weeks than wear out your welcome.”

Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson said he would have been interested in “Ballyhoo” if he were still programming the 1,000-seat Doolittle Theatre, where he presented the Ahmanson series for six seasons. However, he considers the reconfigured Ahmanson--with a bottom capacity of 1,400--too big.

The big question about “Picasso,” which will open the series in January, may be whether it didn’t already use up its audience at the Westwood--only a few miles from the Wilshire. It sold more than 120,000 tickets to 333 performances. But Wiviott noted that it did “a lot of repeat business” there and that this version will feature a different cast--including Mark Nelson and Paul Provenza. “How do you get people to go back 12 times to ‘The Sound of Music’?” he asked. “You hire different people for it.”

Wiviott thinks the Wilshire is the “perfect theater in the perfect location” for these plays. This will be the first time nonmusical plays have been offered in a Nederlander subscription series since 1991. Wiviott, who left Nederlander in 1993 to work at the Alex Theatre but stayed there only one year, said “there wasn’t a team in place that had the resources to aggressively market a play series” until he returned last year.

Meanwhile, don’t worry about the Fonda going relatively unused, he added. The Fonda “will get something else, which you’ll hear about later.” This mysterious “something else” will probably occur even before the scheduled opening of the Red Line subway extension to Hollywood late next year. And after the subway opens and starts spewing out riders practically at the doorsteps of the Pantages and Fonda, he predicted that “everything will start to blossom again” in the long-depressed Hollywood theater district.