Musical Comedy Is Right at Home in Hotel’s La Cajole Room

Normally, when an unknown producer with an unknown cast mounts an unknown play, he’s fortunate to find an empty storefront or a little theater that more than likely was once a shoe store or warehouse. On occasion, old funeral parlors are turned into theaters (as was the case with American Renegade Theatre in North Hollywood).

But 29-year-old writer, director and producer Phil Whitfield, a devotee of cabaret theater, likes to think in glamorous terms. With his script of “Picasso Fiasco,” a musical comedy set in 1930s Paris, tucked under his arm, he intrepidly approached the management of the swanky Ma Maison Hotel Sofitel in West Hollywood and proposed a grandiose idea: “Let’s put on a show. You give me the space, I’ll bring the costumes.”

Or words to that effect.

In any event, the soft-spoken Whitfield’s deal to book “Picasso Fiasco” into the La Cajole Restaurant in the French-owned hotel dismayed its more staid habitues. The hotel, the Los Angeles flagship of Sofitel’s international chain, had never booked a lounge singer, let alone a full theatrical production.

But Whitfield, who is from England, pitched his show just at the point when hotel management was experimenting with efforts to better fill the dark-wooded La Cajole room, which had failed to draw much attention from its bustling intersection at Beverly and La Cienega boulevards.

Voila! La Cajole has been transformed through the bizarre and wacky “Picasso Fiasco” into a replica of its real-life Parisian namesake, La Capole, a famous Montparnasse brasserie launched in 1927 as a heady Jazz Age watering hole.

“I was gazing one day at our La Cajole space, wondering how to make it more festive, when this persistent young man (Whitfield) came in with a musical set in Paris,” explained Claude Roussel, Hotel Sofitel marketing and beverage director and chief impetus for the hotel’s involvement.

“At first I didn’t want to do it,” Roussel continued, “because I was afraid it wouldn’t fit in with the hotel’s image. Then I thought, Why not? The show’s set in a Paris hotel, it’s ideally done in a French hotel and we are a French company. (The parent firm is Paris-based Accor Corp.) I read the material and it captured that wonderful artistic period that is now gone.”

In fact, Whitfield’s musical cornucopia, or Theatre Le Petit as he calls it, is so French-drenched that the characters include Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway and Leon Trotsky--who was in Mexico at the time, instead of France, but no matter; this is not a historical work, but a blaze of creative tinkering.

There is also an anonymous, feared art critic, and, in a symbolic portrayal, Picasso himself, who materializes as a metaphorical brush stroke from his blue period, costumed head to foot in robin’s-egg blue.

And waiting backstage, with plans for future appearances, are expatriates F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller, and such French spirits as Jean-Paul Sartre and Edith Piaf (to be performed by Piaf-sound-alike Stephanie Naiseh).

Roussel, who has added an optional pre-show dinner to the evening’s entertainment, concedes that his willingness to gamble on the show is influenced by memories of his hotel days in Monte Carlo, where he ministered three years to glitterati such as Frank Sinatra, Princess Grace, Liza Minnelli and Elton John.

“Picasso Fiasco,” is best experienced with an absinthe--or two or three. Whitfield is reluctant to admit it but he wrote his initial draft of the musical book in eight hours. Actually, Whitfield, a painter by preference and by passion, wrote approximately as he paints, splashing emotions together as if executing one of his abstractions on canvas.

“I don’t mean to sound flippant, but ‘Picasso Fiasco,’ ” said Whitfield, “is from my subconscious. There is in the show a reality that’s part of my life. I’ve felt those fears my characters feel for the arrival of the critic, so I’ve learned to attack my work with sheer confidence. There’s always a lot of people stabbing at you but you’d never get anything done if you listened to everybody’s negativity.”

The performers typify either new-to-Los Angeles, Ivy League-trained artists, such as Dede Schmeiser, as the nominal ringleader Gertrude Stein, or late bloomers who wedged into acting relatively late, such as Jody Mullenax as Matisse/Hemingway and Alan Charof, the cast’s oldest member, who plays Trotsky.

Charof, who used to run an employment agency, came to the show when he answered an ad in Drama Logue. Mullenax, a one-time bodyguard, gravitated from stand-up comedy, hired a drama coach and is making his theatrical debut.

The most experienced cast member is Chu Chu Montgomery, the Josephine Baker character whose strong suit is singing, not, like Baker, dancing. Coached by Della Reese and onetime backup singer for Sammy Davis Jr., Montgomery broke into music at age 11 appearing with Sam Cook, “but I had no idea how great he was.” With a forte of gospel / jazz, Montgomery is reviving her career, regrouping following years off for marriage, motherhood and divorce.

No show gets off the ground easily, and “Picasso Fiasco” is no exception. The first preview night, the production ran up against deafening noise from a singles party that had spilled into the hallway outside the theater. The throng grew so loud that Picasso (or was it Matisse?) was seen exchanging personal cards with a beaming painter’s model from Venice.

After some ragged previews, common to most new musicals, the production’s best bet to uncork a promising opening this weekend is its strong, original music and propulsive live, five-man band, led by its composer and on-stage keyboardist Phil Small, a musical discovery from Berklee College of Music.

Think of “An American in Paris” anchored to a contemporary beat. Imagine Gene Kelly, who, after all, played a struggling artist in the movie, swirling the floor at La Cajole with Leslie Caron. Stranger things have happened.

“Picasso Fiasco,” Ma Maison Sofitel Hotel, La Cajole Restaurant, 8555 Beverly Blvd., West Hollywood, 9 p.m. Friday-Saturday . Pre-show dinner optional, La Cajole, 7-9 p.m. Runs indefinitely. $17.50 for the show, $35 for both show and dinner. (310) 278-5444, Ext. 319.