THEATER : The Long, Happy Life of ‘Picasso’ : It isn’t a musical and it has no big-name stars, so how did Steve Martin’s ‘Picasso at the Lapin Agile’ buck the odds to be an L.A. hit?

‘Picasso at the Lapin Agile” was hardly a sure-fire bet.

The show brought no credentials from New York or London--the markets that matter the most in terms of selling commercial productions elsewhere. It wasn’t a musical, traditionally theater’s best-selling genre.

The title didn’t sound catchy enough for a commercial sound bite. Just pronouncing it was a challenge for anyone who hadn’t studied French--even director Randall Arney said he had trouble saying the title for the first two weeks he was working on the play.

“Picasso” was booked into the Westwood Playhouse, one of the largest of L.A.’s mid-sized theaters. Head-scratching about what’s wrong with mid-sized theater has been one of the L.A. theater community’s favorite pastimes over the past several years. And Actors’ Equity scale is higher at the Westwood than at smaller mid-sized venues.

Worst of all, there were no stars on stage--only on the page. Yes, Steve Martin wrote “Picasso,” but he wasn’t in it. Could his name on the script be enough to draw big crowds to his jokey yet brainy comedy about a fictitious encounter between Picasso and Einstein?

Maybe so. Whatever the reason, when “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” closes next Sunday, its 333 performances will have set a record as the longest-running show at the Westwood Playhouse.

“Picasso” has grossed more than $3.1 million, selling in excess of 120,000 tickets. On average, “Picasso” audiences filled nearly 88% of the Westwood’s 498 seats.

The show recouped its entire $350,000 investment 12 weeks after opening, and its investors are earning a 39% return.

“People say, ‘You can’t make a living in the theater in L.A.,’ ” said the show’s co-producer and general manager, Joan Stein. “Well, everybody in my office is wearing clothes, driving cars, paying rent. They’re making a living in the theater. I don’t know where these ugly rumors get started.”

Stein has had more success making a living in L.A.’s mid-sized arena than any other producer in years, thanks to her stewardship of the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills, which she manages on behalf of herself and Susan Dietz. Stein’s co-productions of “Love Letters” and “Forever Plaid” at the Canon lasted longer and grossed more than even “Picasso.”

But those shows had obvious draws that “Picasso” lacked. They had been successful in New York. “Love Letters” relied on a string of celebrity names to fill its two roles. “Forever Plaid” is a musical, and it had already garnered acclaim close to home--in nonprofit productions in San Diego and Pasadena.

“Picasso,” on the other hand, had played only in Chicago and Cambridge, Mass. Its inaugural production opened at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre on Oct. 22, 1993--precisely one year before virtually the same production opened in Los Angeles.

Scheduled to play only four weeks, the Chicago run extended into 5 1/2 months. “It was a real crowd-pleaser,” said Stephen Eich, then Steppenwolf’s managing director. The production cost only $100,000 on top of the already existing Steppenwolf overhead.

E ven as the Chicago run continued, and during a subsequent production in the spring of 1994 at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Martin was rewriting. He came up with a new ending in time for the play’s arrival in Los Angeles.

The play’s L.A. run was originally intended as a cooperative venture between two nonprofit institutions, the Steppenwolf and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Martin is a trustee. The idea was that the Steppenwolf production would transfer from Chicago to a space somewhere at the museum itself--in time to play in conjunction with LACMA’s “Picasso and the Weeping Women” exhibition in February-May, 1994.

That idea never took off. The LACMA auditorium was booked with other events, and Eich said a search for an alternative space within the museum proved fruitless--especially after the Northridge earthquake shook up a potential site, the former May Co. building adjacent to the museum.

But Steppenwolf decided to keep looking for an L.A. venue. “To Steve Martin, Chicago had been a tryout,” Arney said. “L.A. is his hometown.”

Steppenwolf has many other L.A. ties--many of its members work in Hollywood (John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Gary Sinise, Gary Cole and John Mahoney, among others) and have L.A. homes. Though Steppenwolf had mounted other productions outside of Chicago (including “The Grapes of Wrath” at La Jolla Playhouse and London in 1989 and on Broadway, where it won the best play Tony in 1990), L.A. had yet to see work by Steppenwolf, and it was important for the company’s reputation to make a splash here, according to Bruce Sagan, former president of the Steppenwolf board.

No one expected it to be easy. Steppenwolf’s most recent venture outside of Chicago was a financially disastrous foray on Broadway with “The Song of Jacob Zulu” in 1993. “And I had heard that L.A. was a terrible theater town,” Sagan said.

Nonetheless, 19 investors--most from Chicago--ponied up the necessary $350,000. The largest single investment was $70,000 from Leavitt/Fox Theatricals/Mages, a group of Chicago and St. Louis theater producers and presenters who had previously worked with Steppenwolf. The Shubert Organization invested $50,000--and also will contribute to the Off Broadway staging (slated to open at the 399-seat Promenade Theater on Oct. 22, the same date as its precursors).

Sagan invested $40,000 of his own money in the L.A. “Picasso.” He’ll make a hefty return on it--but not enough to make up for his “Zulu” loss, he said. The Steppenwolf company itself invested nothing, but will walk away with approximately 20% of the profits.

The Westwood Playhouse was the logical L.A. venue, said director Arney: “Our set [from Chicago] fit beautifully, as if it were designed for the Westwood. And Steve Martin was excited by the location--he thought it was where his audience might come.”

Chicago actors came out, as well as director Arney and the designers (all but three of the actors remain as the production prepares to close).

Stein, with her L.A. expertise, was brought in to manage and market the show. Los Angeles has few newspapers and radio stations with “theater demographics,” she said. “Selling time” is shorter than in some cities. With fewer mid-sized or larger theaters, the theater mailing lists are “less targeted,” she added.

She found useful lists, though, starting with LACMA’s. She concentrated her broadcasting efforts on KKGO, the classical music station, and public radio sponsorships. Concierges were wooed, and “we blanketed the city with flyers and posters with bright colors”--important, she said, “because this was a play about a great artist.”

“In Los Angeles, you have to make people aware that the theater experience is an important part of their lives,” Stein said. “It has to be an event. I like to create the environment of a party that everyone likes to go to.”

Though there were no celebrities on stage, those in the audience helped create this kind of a buzz. Thanks to Martin’s and Steppenwolf’s connections, opening night was loaded with famous faces, and “on any given night, the lobby looked like Chasen’s in its heyday,” Stein boasted.

Martin’s name certainly attracted customers, and Martin was “very generous in promoting it,” Stein said. Indeed, before the play ever came to Los Angeles, the making of “Picasso” was the focus of a long Steve Martin profile in the New Yorker; the magazine’s art critic Adam Gopnik had even attended the play’s first reading at Martin’s Beverly Hills home, where Tom Hanks read the role of Picasso and Chris Sarandon played Einstein.

(That kind of attention would make any producer salivate over the possibility of doing Martin’s next play, but though Martin has written a couple of shorter pieces that have received brief runs, he currently has no new plays in the works, said his publicist.)

One local “Picasso” theatergoer reported that others in the audience, upon opening their programs, expressed surprise that Martin wasn’t in the play. But no one asked for a refund on that pretext, Stein said.

O nce inside the theater, was everyone delighted? Some were, others weren’t. Most of the reviews were friendly but not raves--the production wasn’t nominated for any critics’ awards. Reactions heard over the past few months were mixed.

Still, Stein maintains it was word of mouth about the play itself, not Martin’s name, that turned it into a hit. Daily box-office receipts tripled, she said, after the first performance.

“It’s a smart play, yet very accessible,” Arney said. Even the difficult title reflects this: “It’s whimsical, but it lets people who might expect arrows through the head [based on Martin’s former stand-up act] know there’s something substantial here.”

In the play, set in 1904, the characters discuss what the 20th Century might hold, “and it’s hitting at a time when people are reflecting on what the 20th Century was all about,” Arney added. “We’re going to have a lot of retrospectives, but Steve has a pretty smart first shot at all that.”

Furthermore, Arney believes the play “resonated with an L.A. audience because that’s really where it came from. Discussions of celebrity vs. genius vs. talent hit home with L.A. audiences.”

Yet apparently L.A. audiences don’t insist on seeing the celebs on stage. “The play’s the star,” Arney said. “I’m thrilled that’s enough in L.A. or anywhere.”