Art Museum Holds ‘Moulin Rouge’ Gala

An artist--or might it have been a model?--said that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec would have found the scene Friday at the San Diego Museum of Art so familiar that he would have been reluctant to lift a languid hand to sketch it for posterity.

That would have been a compliment for Kate Adams and the all-male committee that assembled “Moulin Rouge,” the 34th annual Fine Arts Ball, but it would not necessarily have been true. The diminutive but aristocratic chronicler of the demimonde would have been confounded, for example, by the replica of the Eiffel Tower, an exact reproduction which rose a mere 30 feet over the museum entrance. On the other hand, l’artiste des femmes de soir would have felt quite at home in the midst of the one-night-only street scene, which was populated with sidewalk artists, cancan dancers, streetwalkers and jugglers as a clever inauguration for the exhibition of “Toulouse-Lautrec: The Baldwin M. Collection.”

Night of Activities

It so happened that on a mid-October night bursting with high-energy activity (the San Diego Symphony opened its current season the same evening, Vice President George Bush was in town for a private reception and the San Diego Zoo’s annual ‘Kicks for Critters’ drew a healthy crowd to the ballroom of a Mission Valley motel), the museum attracted a rather creme de la creme assortment of notables for its yearly gala. The mood overall was of turn-of-the-century Parisian naughtiness interpreted according to the mannered mores of 1988, which is to say frivolous but polite.

There was a definite temptation to be otherwise. The gala began with a Champagne-fueled tour of the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit, replete with its representations of characters who, then as now, would attract attention in almost any surroundings. Once past the exhibition galleries, the guests entered a scene out of la belle epoque that featured artists, strolling couples, an organ grinder-cum-monkey and various disreputable characters; the amusing fact was that a number of guests eschewed black tie in favor of period dress and were mistaken as actors hired by party designers Jim Crawford and Michael Coleman.

Crawford said he and his partner worked around the clock (and he repeatedly emphasized the 24-hour nature of their travails) for two weeks to create the Moulin Rouge milieu, which included not only the remarkable replica of the Eiffel Tower, but a twirling windmill above the entrance to the Sculpture Garden dinner site and an elevated orchestra stage copied exactly from a Toulouse-Lautrec sketch. If the Wayne Foster Orchestra, with its renditions of “Louie-Louie” and other definitive 1960s works, failed to capture the 1890s Paris mood, it nonetheless kept the dance floor jammed and set a tone. Collection donor Maruja Baldwin Hodges and most museum principals were on hand for the event. Hodges said of the gala that it was “Just what I would have chosen for the opening of the exhibit. When I decided to give my collection away, I knew that it had to go to San Diego, and I’m very happy with my decision.”

‘Art Will Still Be Here’

Museum director Steven Brezzo, who has hosted many galas in honor of traveling exhibits, said he was especially pleased by Friday’s fete champetre . “The best thing about this party is that, when all the decorations are down and the evening is over, the works of art will still be here,” said Brezzo. “The works of Toulouse-Lautrec are here to stay, they’re part of the community and they’ll always be here. We’ve acquired one of the great collections in the country.”

Museum President Joseph Hibben captured the mood rather neatly when he said, “We all like to have our jollies, and I think that guy (Toulouse-Lautrec) had his share. It’s fun to imitate him.”

Ball chairman Adams periodically used her black feather boa to dry the showers of compliments that rained upon her from all sides.

“Everyone says it really feels like Paris at the turn of the century, and that’s exactly the impression we wanted to create,” said Adams.

The lengthy seated dinner was given in the Copley Auditorium and in the Sculpture Garden, both of which were periodically invaded by a bevy of cancan dancers who whooped it up to Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld.” The menu, catered by the Sculpture Garden Cafe and a real tribute to la haute cuisine , ran from lobster salad to a truffled veal chop and chocolate mousse cakes inscribed with Toulouse-Lautrec’s distinctive “TL” mark.

The guest list included Lee and Lawrence Cox, Alice and Richard Cramer, David Copley, Charmaine and Maurice Kaplan, Jane and Lou Metzger, Virginia and Jack Monday, Helene and Ed Muzzy, Alison and George Gildred, Kathy and George Pardee, Patsy and Forrest Shumway, Sally and John Thornton, Audrey Geisel, Walter Fitch, Martha and George Gafford, Eva and Marc Stern, Eleanor and Arthur Herzman, Helen and Bennett Wright, Anne and John Davies, Sue and Charles Edwards, and gala consultant Howard Matson.

La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff, a true man of the theater but a rocker at heart, made the 190 guests at the theater’s annual gala sing for their suppers by demanding their interjected “mmm bop, bop, bop bop” as chorus to his intense version of Buddy Holly’s “Fade Away.”

McAnuff and his guitar closed the post-dinner show at “Cuisine and Cabaret From Around the World,” given Saturday at the Sheraton Harbor Island East as the second in the series of food-and-entertainment-oriented fund-raisers inaugurated by the Playhouse in 1987. Since it followed the close of the theater’s highly successful run of the new musical, “80 Days,” the gala took its cue from the production and offered an international array of foods in a setting decorated with 6-foot-tall hot-air balloons and Oriental motifs.

Food and Theater

The pairing of respected contributing chefs from around the country (Thomas Kellar of New York’s currently super-hot Rakel dished up the lobster minestrone) with performers from “80 Days” made for a contented audience that found the evening easy to digest. Among those contentedly digging into the veal with forest mushrooms prepared by Celestino Drago of Celestino’s in Beverly Hills were a few alumni from the Playhouse’s early days, including actors Don DeFore and Martha Scott, and hoofer Gene Nelson.

Event co-chairmen Dorothy Johnston and Lois Stanton had their answers at the ready when asked to highlight the connection between food and the theater. “Food is theater, and we should always try to get some theatricality into our meals,” said Johnston. “Both are entertainment,” added Stanton; indeed, the concept certainly seemed reasonable when chef Steven Froman of Butler’s in Mill Valley sent out his Mexican chocolate cake with “caramelly” cajeta sauce.

The cabaret started giddily enough with Scott Harlan and Brooks Almy’s “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine,” turned desperately serious with Lannyl Stephens’ “Tell Me on a Sunday,” and returned to a goofy note with Ralph Bruneau’s “Love Story.” Besides rocking and rolling, McAnuff treated the audience to a couple of numbers from his own “The Death of Von Richthofen as Witnessed From Earth,” which he will direct next year, in a Russian-language version, at the Sovremennik Theatre in Moscow.

The guest list included Playhouse angel Mandell Weiss, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, Anne and Bill Otterson, Liz and Mason Phelps, Peggy and Peter Reuss, Colette and Ivor Royston, Maureen and T Shiftan, Eileen and Willard VanderLaan, Ellen and Roger Revelle, and Marie and Merle Olesen.