Dose of Reality : Creators of the new musical ‘Greetings From Venice Beach’ attempt to capture the fun and the frustration of life on the boardwalk

For the casual visitor, Venice Beach means street performers, throngs of scantily clad sunbathers, and great bargains on T-shirts and sunglasses.

For the people who live there, however, this fantasy world masks an increasingly nervous reality. Tension is everywhere--between the homeowners and the homeless, the merchants and the street people, the haves and the have-nots.

The creators of “Greetings From Venice Beach,” a new musical opening this week in Hollywood, hope to capture the fun and the frustration of the Venice Boardwalk in their show. It opens Thursday at a former neon factory in Hollywood that has been christened, appropriately enough, The Neon Factory.

“When we started writing it, in 1979, before Ronald Reagan came into office, there wasn’t a homeless problem,” said Paul Gordon, who co-wrote the book, music and lyrics. In today’s post-Reaganomics, recession-plagued Venice, he noted, the issue has come to the forefront of people’s concerns. As a result, over 13 years of rewrites, it also worked its way into the script.

“It’s about the political issue that’s going on in Venice right now, the dispute between the people who have no place to go, and the people who live there in their expensive townhouses who don’t want any more homeless people hanging around,” he said. “I wouldn’t say it’s about homelessness, but there is that battle.”

If a musical about California urban issues is unusual, so is the staging. A huge room is being transformed into a replica of the Venice Boardwalk, complete with sand, shop fronts and a wall-length wave mural representing the ocean. Patrons will have the choice of observing the action from a reserved seat in the balcony or of sitting on benches or beach chairs as the play unfolds around them.

Those who choose to sit closer to the action may be forced to move from time to time, as the setting shifts from one spot on the boardwalk to another. At times, one of the actors may force them to move, so they will get a small taste of how the street people get “pushed around,” as book co-writer Janit Baldwin put it.

“We have some very gritty things to say,” Gordon said. “But at the same time, it is a musical. We want people to leave with hope and not despair.”

“And we want to celebrate the diversity,” Baldwin added.

The two of them, along with songwriter Jay Gruska, who also co-wrote the music and lyrics, are currently into their third calendar decade of trying to get that balance right. According to Gordon, he and Baldwin came up with the original idea during a theatergoing trip to New York in 1979.

“We had just seen all the musicals, and we thought, ‘There isn’t anything for young people to see. There isn’t anything with contemporary energy, with a street edge to it,’ ” he recalled. “We started to write it on the plane ride home--and spent the next 12 years polishing it.”

The first draft, which was written in two days, was set in New York City. “The main problem,” Baldwin said, “was we lived in California and knew nothing about New York.”

After a reading in a friend’s living room, someone suggested the setting should be changed to Venice Boardwalk. The creators immediately agreed, and another series of rewrites began.

The initial showing was a 1984 production in a small Pasadena theater. Featured in the cast was a then-unknown actress named Katey Sagal. (The “Married . . . With Children” star has invested in the current production.) The musical, then called “Backstreet,” received positive notices, but Gordon, Gruska and Baldwin knew it could be better, and they returned to work on it not long after the show closed.

“It wouldn’t go away,” Baldwin said. “It kept living with us. We would lay it down for some time. But it wouldn’t go away. It had its own life.” Paul has written other things, including a musical of “Jane Eyre,” and between rewrites, he and Jay went on with their careers as songwriters. (Their work has been recorded by Bette Midler, Quincy Jones, Olivia Newton-John, the Pointer Sisters and many others.)

Unsatisfied with the cartoonish nature of the characters they had written, Gordon and Baldwin began visiting Venice and talking to the young people on the street. “We got a lot of information that was very helpful,” Gordon said. “Not everyone opened up to us, but the ones who did were very open. I can’t tell you what that brought to the piece. That’s a great deal of the reason why it’s improved. Some of our cast members are going down there now to learn more about their characters.”

Ultimately, the show took the form of a murder mystery. It begins with a fire, apparently arson, in a homeless shelter that is under construction on the Venice Boardwalk. Killed in the blaze is the man director Joshua Rosenzweig calls “the guru figure” of the street people, “a hippie leftover from the ‘60s.”

The police intimidate a onetime homeless woman into returning to her old Venice haunts to try to discover who set the fire. As she investigates, we meet the various characters, including an elderly woman who lives alone in a nearby apartment, a rich kid who hangs out at the boardwalk all day but goes home to the Palisades at night, and a recent runaway who is adjusting to life on the streets.

As the script evolved, so did the score. Songs were written and discarded; Gordon estimates they went through 60 or 70 to come up with the 17 that remain in the show.

But the songwriters’ goal remained the same. “We didn’t want to write an old-school musical comedy,” said Gordon. “We wanted to bring a more youthful element to it.”

“It’s a hybrid of urban pop and Sondheim-influenced musical theater, and probably everything in-between,” Gruska said. “There are some jazz-swing moments. There are some urban R&B-type; moments. There are some ballads pulled from a combination of pop and theatrical influences.”

Something like “Hair”?

“ ‘Hair’ is probably a decent prototype. But the thing we were cautioned about by some of our elders, and it was good advice, was to not just make it a vehicle for 10 pop tunes. The songs had to propel the scene forward, just as in a standard musical. That’s what’s taken a lot of time. We’ve had to learn how to do that.”

A mutual friend gave a tape of “Jane Eyre” to Rosenzweig, artistic director of Strike Theatre (and a sophomore in high school when work started on the play in ‘79). When he expressed interest in staging the work, he learned the creators were not interested in having it mounted until they finished their Venice Beach musical. Rozensweig then listened to that score, and “the more I listened to it, the more I fell in love with it.”

He met with the creators and suggested the environmental staging. They agreed, and planning for the current production began. As with previous Strike Theatre productions, part of the proceeds will be donated to a worthy cause--in this case, Phoenix House, which operates a shelter on the Venice Boardwalk.

Gordon, Gruska and Baldwin are now thinking ahead to possible productions in other cities, though they doubt New York would be interested in a show so thoroughly drenched in L.A. culture. They hope the work has reached its final form, but know there is plenty of material to be found if they decide still more rewrites are needed.

“There is so much color down there,” Gordon marveled. “There are so many stories in Venice Beach. This could have been written 100 different ways.”

Gruska interrupted him with a reminder: “It was.”

“Greetings From Venice Beach” plays at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and at 7 p.m. Sunday through Dec. 13 at the Neon Factory, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Tickets: $18 to $20, $14 for students and seniors. Call (213) 466-1767.