The Wilshire’s Make-Over Gets Rave Reviews

A year ago, if you had asked knowledgeable Los Angeles theatergoers which local space should host the first stop for the national touring production of director Sam Mendes’ grimly re-imagined “Cabaret,” hardly anyone would have suggested the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Compared to the much smaller nightclubs where “Cabaret” was playing in New York, the 1,910-seat Wilshire would have struck most observers as too big and stodgy. It was where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton did “Private Lives,” where Claudette Colbert and Rex Harrison appeared in “Aren’t We All?,” where “Grease” played for six weeks not long ago.

But just look at the Wilshire now. “Cabaret” has transformed it, or at least its lower level. The 929 conventional seats on the orchestra level are gone, replaced by tiered seating for only 530, mostly on cane cabaret-style chairs (although 30 spectators at each performance get to sit on upholstered banquettes).

Theatergoers on the orchestra level can carry drinks into the house and park them on little tables. At each table and on partitions between the banquette seats, lamps provide a glow that rises during the cabaret numbers and recedes during the more conventional scenes. The theater’s primary colors are radically changed. Even the lobby and marquee look different.

The make-over has been such a hit that the building’s leaseholder, the Nederlander Organization, plans to make the new configuration permanent, if long-term permits can be obtained from the city.

“Jekyll and Hyde” star Linda Eder will sing there on May 8, a week after “Cabaret” leaves. Such big-league cabaret stars find the Wilshire much more desirable now, said Martin Wiviott, the managing director of Nederlander’s Broadway/LA series, of which “Cabaret” is a part. “Suddenly everyone wants to see it. Someone said just the other day, ‘I felt like I was in the Cocoanut Grove.’ ” Wiviott hopes that the future of the reconfigured space will embrace revues and other book musicals with performance elements similar to “Cabaret,” in addition to concerts.

The problem with the Wilshire in the past, Wiviott said, was that the stage wasn’t deep enough for big musicals, yet the audience chamber was too deep and seated too many for most nonmusical plays. The Wilshire has been dark most of the time in recent years.

Enter the “Cabaret” tour’s primary producer, Pace Theatrical Group, and the tour’s set designer, Robert Brill.

Pace had an agreement with the New York co-directors, Mendes and Rob Marshall, to inaugurate the tour with an environment as close to the one in New York as possible, company President Scott Zeiger said. So Pace officials and Brill examined “every club, ex-strip joint and theater in L.A.”--that is, those that might accommodate 1,300. A capacity of 800 to 900 “may be cool for an open-ended run in New York, but it made no economic sense for a 10-week run in L.A.,” a relatively brief time in which to amortize the costs of transforming the space and housing the New York-based cast.

Backstage facilities were another factor in the site selection. Some of the rougher alternative spaces needed better dressing rooms, Zeiger said. Brill was concerned that those spaces lacked the necessary technical equipment.

Nederlander, which is a 20% investor in the $3-million tour (Pace contributed 60% and the Jujamycn Organization furnished the other 20%), was eager to use the Wilshire. Brill took a good look and concluded that it just might work. Using computer software, he demonstrated what it would look like “before the first nail was pounded,” Zeiger said.

Brill, a product of UC San Diego and the San Diego theater scene, got his professional start as a designer of site-specific productions--experience that would prove valuable for “Cabaret.” As a co-founder of San Diego’s avant-garde Sledgehammer Theatre, he designed shows in warehouses, ex-garages, stores, a heliport. It was at the Old Globe Theatre’s small arena-style space where he created his first cabaret-within-a-theater, for “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” in 1990.

Some modest renovations of the Wilshire were already planned because of water damage, Brill said. He worked with the Nederlander Organization to do these in a way that would make sense for “Cabaret.” The theater came with mostly black walls and an off-white ceiling. “The eye went up to the ceiling because it was light,” Brill said, making the space seem even bigger. Brill used fabric and paint to make the audience chamber “a deep, rich burgundy” and also redid the lobby in darker colors. He ran electrical wires throughout the orchestra level for the little lamps and added accent lighting. Then he topped it with red carpeting--not as permanent as the hardwood floors he installed in the New York production’s Studio 54 space but better for the Wilshire’s acoustics.

Brill tried to draw a line “between creating a theme park and staying true to the venue. We wanted it to seem authentic for both the piece and for the building.” In fact, his research revealed that there were some Weimar-era clubs in ballrooms as big as the Wilshire, but they weren’t as seedy as the one in “Cabaret.”

The effort required a workload equivalent to designing two or three separate shows, Brill said. Zeiger added that the renovation of the Wilshire cost an extra $300,000 on top of the tour’s regular budget. But renovations of the theaters in other cities along the tour route will cost only about half that much, because the tables and chairs will occupy only the front third of the orchestra level in most of the cities. Once the tour is on its feet, there won’t be enough time to do the renovations that were done at the Wilshire, and most of the other theaters are already more intimate than the Wilshire.

So it may have finally been to the Wilshire’s advantage that it was so big and so seldom used. “If it were highly booked, they never would have let us demolish it,” Zeiger said.