Troubled From Soup to Nuts, Dinner Theater Closes

It’s not been the best season for the Mission Hills Dinner Theatre’s “Best of Hollywood Holiday Revue.”

First, in a copyright dispute, a federal judge ordered the theater company’s operator, Edmund Gaynes, to cut more than half the songs from his show.

Then, Gaynes’ landlord evicted the weekend theater company. A 30-day notice posted outside its door last week gave Gaynes until Dec. 31 to vacate the theater, in a small building that also houses a bar and cafe next to the Mission Hills Inn on Sepulveda Boulevard.

For about 24 hours, Gaynes danced through this flak with a trouper’s flare for the dramatic. He planned a great finale.

“We’ll finish the ‘Holiday Revue’ on New Year’s Eve,” he said early Thursday morning, still undaunted.

By then, he said, he’d find a new home, where he would stage “The Music Man” in January.

Later, Gaynes reconsidered. His lawyer announced that Gaynes was canceling “Holiday Revue” to devote all his energy to relocating.

“He’s just going to take the 30 days to get reorganized,” attorney Richard N. Burns said. “Just the logistical problem of closing in this place and trying to reopen in another would just be too much.”

No Record of License

Gaynes, a former actor, began running the dinner-theater company three years ago, after an auto accident took him off the stage. He said his troubles began just before Thanksgiving, when he called the Rodgers and Hammerstein Library Museum in New York to request an extension of the license for the company’s summer musical, “South Pacific.”

The library turned him down. It said there was no record the company ever had a license to perform the musical.

Gaynes threw together a quick revue of Broadway numbers for the holiday. It opened the weekend before Thanksgiving. That was its last hurrah.

That week, a lawyer representing the library called Gaynes to inform him that U.S. District Judge Richard A. Gadbois Jr. in Los Angeles had issued a temporary restraining order barring him from staging the revue.

The library’s attorney, Robert V. Kuenzel, said the theater company did not have a license to use a selection of songs from “South Pacific” and “Sound of Music” in the revue.

X At a hearing before Gadbois on Tuesday, Gaynes admitted no guilt but consented to an injunction preventing him from using the Rodgers and Hammerstein material.

Kuenzel said the Rodgers and Hammerstein library is seeking damages of a minimum of $250 per performance of “South Pacific.”

Gaynes said the producers of “South Pacific” told him they had a license. He has tried to reach them to confirm that, he said, but they are out of the country.

Gaynes said he felt justified in using the Rodgers and Hammerstein songs in the holiday show because they were not used in a dramatic performance, which would require payment of royalties.

However, he said: “We’re not trying to fight it. We don’t have the money to fight them.”

Gaynes originally hoped to salvage the revue by adding a few other numbers.

Eviction Notice

Then he found the eviction notice on his door.

It was not a complete surprise, he said. Gaynes said he understands that the Mission Hills Inn, which owns the small building next door, has decided to discontinue managing it and has leased the property to someone else.

“The dinner theater goes with that,” he said.

The manager of the inn could not be reached for comment.

Gaynes said he is looking at a couple of buildings that could become his new theater.

“We are just in the process of closing down temporarily,” he said.