OLD GLOBE IS WINNER OF GRANT

The Old Globe Theatre scored a coup by heading the theater category in the National Endowment for the Arts’ list of 1986 challenge grant winners, announced Tuesday. Eight California arts groups--three each in San Francisco and Los Angeles, one in Pasadena and the Old Globe in San Diego--received a challenge grant this year. A total of $21.5 million will be distributed nationally to 63 organizations.

The Globe’s share is $500,000. As part of the terms of the award, the theater must match that with at least $1,675,000 in additional funding. It is the only California theater funded in the challenge program this year. Houston’s Alley Theater was the only other theater to receive as large an award.

The grant enables the Globe to do many splendored things in two areas: Part will provide a basis to build institutional stability and part will serve as seed money for capital needs.

“We’re living hand-to-mouth right now,” Globe development director Cassie Solomon Day said. Specifically the funds will go to reduce the debt incurred after two arson-started fires, to augment the Globe’s endowment, to establish a cash reserve, and to create a capital fund for much-needed rehearsal space.

SYMPHONY WATCH: The San Diego Symphony, which also had applied for an NEA challenge grant, lost out because of its record of poor management and financial instability, a source close to the NEA said. The other major criterion the panel used to make awards--artistic excellence--was never in question with the symphony, according to the same source.

The symphony board of directors is hoping such reports will become a thing of the past, that the symphony administration will soon reach a par with the orchestra. Recently hired Executive Director Wesley Brustad is busy molding administrative systems and building a team around Marketing Director Melissa Smith and Finance Director Rick Pond. Smith and Pond have worked with Brustad for six years at orchestras in Spokane and in Los Angeles.

One of the things they may have to learn is detail. Musicians say they are still being treated cavalierly by the staff. A Monday good-faith payment to the players should have been made at 9:30 a.m., according to an agreement with the union, the musicians say. Instead, management posted notices at Saturday night’s concert saying that checks would be available at 2:30 p.m. Orchestra representative Warren Gref said the move was typical of the symphony’s attitude toward the players.

“It’s not just any bits and pieces. You have to go by what you’ve agreed to,” Gref said.

In other symphony news, the players have taken over the Quarter Note Classic, which has previously been a Symphony Assn. fund-raiser.

The Halloween weekend event, which includes a 10K race, 2-mile fun run, 25-mile bicycle ride and 2-mile wheelchair race, will take place Nov. 1. Musicians will again play at designated sites along the routes, and at a free concert for the participants after the races.

Money raised by musicians--last year’s Quarter Note Classic netted $17,000--will go toward concerts the musicians want to put on “in the public interest.”

SEASONINGS: It’s time to catch up with a plenitude of performing arts events recently announced by local arts groups.

Starlight will continue to experiment next season with the occasional “risky” show--meaning a post-1970 musical. Two years ago management tested the contemporary adult waters with “A Chorus Line” (1976), followed this year with “Evita” (1978), which closes Sunday. Before that, Starlight provided meat and potatoes musicals. Now they’re adding a dollop of salsa picante.

“Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1978) will close next summer’s season, along with “Shenandoah,” a 1974 musical drama set during the Civil War. The season includes the more-typical Starlight bon bons such as “Annie Get Your Gun,” “South Pacific” and Irving Berlin’s “Call Me Madam.” If management gets the rights to David Merrick’s 1980 revision of “42nd Street,” it will replace “Call Me Madam” as the opener of Starlight’s 42nd season.

The avant-gardish Sushi performance gallery, where no one has ever stinted on the hot stuff, resides at the opposite end of the spectrum. Much of the work is highly relevant, tending to raise one’s social and political consciousness--or ire. All performances are at 8 p.m.

The October lineup is particularly piquant. New York puppeteer and satirist Paul Zaloom will open the season Oct. 2, 3 and 4 at San Diego Repertory’s theater at 1620 Sixth Ave. He is debuting here with his “Theater of Trash” in which he animates toys, appliances and “assorted junk.”

Local performers Joyce Cutler-Shaw and Arthur Wagner will appear Oct. 7 at Sushi, 852 8th Ave., in “The Messenger: An Odyssey,” a piece about artists as messengers of hidden and current events and survival.

Los Angeles performance artist Rachel Rosenthal reflects on her three-week vacation in the Mojave Desert, touching on aging, toxic and nuclear pollution, and “other destructive aspects of the Earth” in “L.O.W. in Gaia,” Oct. 9, 10 and 11. Performances will be at the playhouse, 1620 6th Ave.

The subject lightens Oct. 18 when “Women of Substance,” the local debut of Baltimore’s Thunder Thigh Revue, performs at Sushi. Joyce J. Scott and Kay Lawal use sex and food in a comic piece on obsessive behavior.

Notorious New York performance artist Karen Finley, the title of whose show is not suitable for a family newspaper, expresses her outrage in a series of monologues about violence, lust and taboos Oct. 24 and 25.

ARTBEATS: Yes, Marilyn Zschau, the prima donna who opens the San Diego Opera season Oct. 11 in the title role of “Tosca,” is related to senatorial candidate Ed Zschau. The soprano is a cousin from the Chicago side of the family. . . .

On Friday the California Arts Council will announce the winners of this year’s organizational and prominent organization grants.