Ron Silver Presents . . . Bill Graham

Bill Graham’s music-soaked career was marked by what one employee called “adventures in public assemblage.”

A rock promoter whose heyday preceded the Nixon presidency, MTV and conglomerates such as SFX Entertainment (now the owners of Graham’s company), Graham lived through 60 years of near-misses, huge success and no little controversy. He died in a 1991 helicopter crash, en route from a Huey Lewis concert.

A stage-worthy life? Certainly. And Ron Silver’s the man for the job. As Graham, Silver is wonderful in the 95-minute theatrical solo “Bill Graham Presents,” now at the Canon Theatre. Noshing on pastrami, dancing the mambo, recalling a painful Holocaust-clouded childhood, grinning like a satyr while reliving an acid-laced Grateful Dead gig, Silver keeps this somewhat rickety machine flying.

It’ll need repairs, though, if Silver plans to fly director Ethan Silverman’s production to New York.

Playwright Robert Greenfield, who co-wrote Graham’s posthumously published 1992 autobiography, doesn’t get his hands dirty enough. His one-man show isn’t the first in theater history to duck many of its subject’s thornier, more troubling aspects. You want some warts to go with all the humanitarian stuff. That’s true of virtually any one-person portrait, outside the realm of saintdom.

Making his first Los Angeles stage appearance in eight years, Silver plays the rock promoter staving off phantoms one late night in 1989. We’re in Graham’s sleek home office in Marin County--a setting, cleverly designed by Keith Ian Raywood, which reveals a trippy, tres ‘60s poster-laden wall.

Dressed in a tux, Graham has come from a MTV awards dinner. His son didn’t show for the supper; Graham has been trying to get his son on the phone all evening.

Graham’s also waiting for a yea or nay from the Rolling Stones. Do they want Graham to handle their “Steel Wheels” tour? Does an old and profitable mutual relationship count for anything anymore? Graham waits and talks, directly addressing the audience.

Born Wolfgang Grajoncast in 1931, Graham was a life story whose narrative particulars were more striking than most. Much of his family was wiped out in the Holocaust. Fleeing Germany, he was separated--forever--from his ailing sister, Tolla. Making his way to New York, Graham was adopted (after an agonizing nine weeks of no takers) by a Bronx family. He grew up fighting off bullies, shaking off an Old World dialect, adopting a new one.

How did this young man, a graduate of the Catskills resort circuit (as a waiter, then a cook), become a legendary fixture of the Bay Area music scene? “Bill Graham Presents” provides the chronology, but not much in the way of imaginative speculation. There’s a stronger comic contrast to be made of Graham’s place in the Haight-Ashbury music scene. He was of that scene, yet utterly apart from it. Doing business with him, said the Dead’s Jerry Garcia, was like doing business with “a martian.” Pete Townshend of the Who, championed early on by Graham, characterized the promoter as the “rock” without whom “all these airheads would fall to bits.”

Others thought less of Graham, his ruthless business tactics, his hypocritical personality extremes. “Bill Graham Presents” hints at these, but mainly we get a man famous for his tantrums of old. Graham’s strains of greed (it’s all about money) and better instincts (it’s about the music, not the money) go relatively unexamined. You don’t want more explicit answers from the writing; you want richer, more ambiguous ones. And playwright Greenfield needs to rely far less on transitional lines such as “The first time I ever saw Eric Clapton? 1967. . . . “

Silver has a leaner, sleeker countenance than the real Graham. Yet he burrows well below the surface of this guarded, hard-driving show business maven. The character’s plagued by “the dark voice,” unresolved survivor’s guilt regarding his family. Silver suggests his dark corners more so, and more effectively, than the play itself.

But Silver makes it worth seeing.

* “Bill Graham Presents,” Canon Theatre, 205 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills. Wednesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 3 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends May 27. $30-$50. (310) 859-2830. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Ron Silver: Bill Graham

Written by Robert Greenfield. Directed by Ethan Silverman. Set by Keith Ian Raywood. Lighting by Mike Baldassari. Sound by Francois Bergeron. Consultant D. Paul Thomas. Production stage manager Meredith J. Greenburg.