Canon’s final act

“The jackhammers were going from 9 a.m. to 2 the next morning,” Rudy Solari said in a 1976 Times interview. The producer-director was recalling how he and a group of actor friends had personally removed 255 tons of concrete and dirt from beneath a Beverly Hills movie house to create dressing rooms under the stage of the new Solari Theatre.

They were converting the former Beverly Canon cinema into what the article went on to describe as “the only live commercial theater in the history of Beverly Hills.”

Soon, the sound of jackhammers will resume in the neighborhood. This time, however, the theater and adjacent buildings will bite the dust. The area that houses the 382-seat Canon Theatre, for a time known as the Solari, will be the site of a new hotel.

The Canon’s final show, a presentation of William Finn’s theatrical song cycle “Elegies,” opens tonight and closes Sunday.

Last week, Calendar assembled half a dozen people on the Canon stage to share their memories of the theater. Solari, who operated the theater only through 1981, died in 1991. But Susan Dietz, the venue’s primary producer from 1983 until now, was there, as was Joan Stein, her producing partner during most of the ‘90s.

The other members of the group:

* Beatrice Arthur of “Maude” and “Golden Girls” fame, who appeared at the Canon in “Bermuda Avenue Triangle” and “Afterplay.”

* David Engel, an original member of the “Forever Plaid” quartet, who performed “Plaid” at the Canon for 20 months in the ‘90s.

* Steven Banks, a performer who was the warmup act for Dick Shawn during Shawn’s nine-month Canon run of his solo outing “The Second Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World” in 1985. While he was offstage -- during most of the show -- Banks retired to the theater’s booth, where he wrote his own one-man show, “Home Entertainment Center” -- which he brought to the Canon in 1989.

* Philip Himberg, artistic director of the Sundance Theatre Institute and director of “War Letters” at the Canon in 2002. He’s staging “Elegies.”

Himberg has a longer history with the Canon than any of the others. On his first trip to the area in 1976, he recalled, “I got off the plane, rented a car and drove here because my one friend in L.A. had given money to Rudy to help convert the theater. There were all these bare lightbulbs. They were so excited that they were starting this major serious theater company in L.A.”

Those plans for a serious company didn’t last. True, Solari presented a few ambitious plays with starry casts, and when Dietz took over, she was running a nonprofit called L.A. Stage Co. that opened with Caryl Churchill’s “Cloud 9.” But by the end of the ‘80s, the Canon was known primarily as a place where shows -- seldom of the serious persuasion -- could sprout their commercial wings, including a handful of transfers from the Pasadena Playhouse.

In the early ‘90s, two of those Pasadena transfers, “Love Letters” and “Forever Plaid,” took off for roughly two-year runs, clearly stamping the Canon as L.A.’s primary home for small-scale, locally produced commercial theater.

It had a “quintessential off-Broadway feeling,” Himberg said.

“You mean, like, crappy?” Dietz joked.

“It’s not a fancy regional theater that received zillions of foundation dollars,” Himberg continued. “It reminds me of working at the [off-Broadway] Cherry Lane.”

On the other hand, Banks said, “it’s such a step above Equity waiver” -- the term once used to designate L.A.’s many sub-100-seat theaters. “This is like Xanadu compared to those.”

When Stein began describing the Canon as “a dream of a space for performers and audience -- you have a unique opportunity to play to a house that feels substantial,” she was interrupted by Arthur:

“Except when the air conditioning goes out. Which is often. Which is horrendous.”

“The reason why,” Engel offered, “is it has no real fly space. So there is nowhere for the heat to go and all the lights just cook it onstage.”

“You have no idea,” responded Stein, “how much money Susie and I spent on that air conditioning.”

Later Arthur acknowledged that she, too, loved “the very fact that it was not state-of-the art. It was sort of like the Judy Garland ‘Let’s put on a show.’ ”

“But you just complained about the air conditioning,” Dietz noted, to laughter all around the table.

Another feature that wasn’t to Arthur’s liking was one of the dressing rooms that Solari and friends had labored to build. When the subject came up, Arthur uttered “Oh, my God” -- twice.

The dressing rooms, as a post-conversation tour confirmed, are windowless and accessible only by steep stairs. When Arthur performed in her plays at the Canon, her son Daniel Saks -- who designed the set for the first, “Bermuda Avenue Triangle” -- built a small dressing room for his mother on the stage, behind the set.

Banks recalled how Shawn fell asleep onstage during the intermission of his show one night. “I remember standing in the wings. We were pounding the floor, going, “Wake up, Dick!”

Dietz remembered that Shawn also used the theater phones to call a 900 sports-related phone line. “I went down to the dressing room very sheepishly one day and said, ‘Dick, a hundred dollars this month for Sports Line.’ He said, ‘Oh, my God, I’ll pay you for it.’ So every month I wrote a little invoice for his Sports Line calls.”

A minute or two away from the opening of a Harry Chapin revue, “Lies and Legends,” in 1988, Dietz said, “the cast was downstairs, they went into their circle that they did, they held hands, they said, ‘OK, go’ ... Blackout. The entire block of Beverly Hills -- the power was gone. Everybody had to go home. It kind of ruined the show. It just never took off.”

Canon audiences were often star-studded. “I’m an old movie fanatic,” Engel said. “It was exciting for me that the Beverly Hills community totally embraced this theater. I would be performing for the same people who had entertained me my whole life.”

Dietz and Stein talked about the value of a local theater producing commercial shows amid the primarily nonprofit landscape of L.A. theater.

“A commercial theater can offer a long run,” Dietz said. “A subscription theater can’t. You wouldn’t get a two-year ‘Forever Plaid’ at the Mark Taper Forum. They have to have subscribers, who get a certain number of shows a year.”

“The thrill of a commercial hit is like nothing else,” Stein said. “It’s great to go backstage and tell the actors: ‘Set up your dressing room. We’re going to be here for a long time.’ ”

“I’ve done a lot of nonprofit theater,” Engel said. “But the difference in performing for an audience in a commercial house is that they actually want to come to see it.”

Yet, Himberg said: “This may sound crass, but in the end the Canon is just a building. It depends primarily on who’s running it. And on the people who were inside it.”

“You and I attracted the best of the best,” Stein told Dietz.

Dietz quoted a line from “Elegies”: “Living was the prize, the ending’s not the story.”