Everybody Gets Into Act at ‘On Stage!’ Gala

Had Mr. Shakespeare crashed the Old Globe’s “On Stage!” gala Friday, he might have chuckled, rewritten his famous “All the world’s a stage” to “This joint is full of hams” and cadged a seat at one of the front tables.

Just about everybody got into the act at the theater’s big annual do, from favored Broadway crooner Michael Feinstein to the 400 or so paying guests to a handful of Soviet thespians to the 100 or so Globe staffers. By the simple expedient of moving the gala from its traditional hotel ballroom venue to the Old Globe grounds and stages, co-chairwomen Jeanne Rivkin and Evelyn Truitt (who billed themselves as “co-producers”) lit the party with the theatrical incandescence that ought to come naturally to a Globe event.

Utilizing the premises not only gave the guests a close-up of what they were supporting (the event netted about $75,000), but let them participate in what amounted to a four-acter, plus asides.

Christened in the spirit of literalness, “On Stage!” took its guests from cocktails on the Lowell Davies Festival Stage to big band dancing on the main stage and disco dancing on the stage in the Cassius Carter Theatre, with stops along the way for dinner on the tented greensward and the Feinstein concert on the main stage. The Aubrey Fay Jazz Band played during dinner and provoked many guests into sustained toe-tapping during the post-concert free-for-all.

Theater staffers helped arrange the event as if it were indeed a theatrical production, and Truitt handed them a liberal share of credit for producing what several participants described as one of the year’s best parties.

“The staff is so proud to do a party on their own turf, and they’ve accomplished so much, especially when they also have to prepare for the several Soviet arts festival programs that will be happening here,” she said.

Globe spokesman Bridget Cantu said “the whole theater” had been involved in building “On Stage!” over several days.

“We’ve all devoted ourselves to this, but what I can’t believe is that tomorrow morning at 7 a.m., the set for ‘Brothers and Sisters’ (a co-production with Leningrad’s Maly Theatre) will be up and ready for inspection,” said Cantu. “Meanwhile, we’ve had Russians here all week.”

Among those Soviets were Maly Theatre artistic director Lev Dodin, technical director Alexei Porai-Koshitz and lead actress Tatyana Shestakova, who all were coached in the San Diego way to party by Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien and managing director Tom Hall.

At times, Hall looked just a bit beleaguered, since he carried both a beeper (for staff emergencies) and a walkie-talkie, with which he coordinated the valet parking, the proceedings on three stages and the activities on the greensward.

“This is a first for me,” he growled good-naturedly. “I swore I’d never do it, but here I am.”

O’Brien said that on the Sunday after “On Stage!” he would be treating the visitors to a “totally Michigan evening” of home cooking at his up-town digs.

“I’m going to make my mother’s famous chicken, which is simmered with three kinds of canned soup and some wild rice for a day and a half,” O’Brien said, adding teasingly, “It makes you exclaim!” (Exclamations may have been the only way to bridge the language gap, since O’Brien also said, “Lev Dodin and I have admitted to one another that we’re too busy to learn the other’s language, but we’re very happy that way.”)

Theatrical topiaries of late-season flowers bloomed under the clear-roofed tent, where the Sheraton Harbor Island hotel catered its first off-premises dinner and succeeded in serving a menu ( timbales Argenteuil , shellfish ravioli and stuffed veal breast) that was grand enough for all but one guest, who said he didn’t like veal and requested that the hotel send out for a Burger King Whopper. The Sheraton obliged.

Feinstein, reportedly one of the Big Apple’s hottest acts, bopped along at his piano for well over an hour, taking brief breaks whenever the audience rose to its feet to cheer him on. He played his own compositions, Irving Berlin’s and Jerome Kern’s, and not just the Kern that everyone knows, but quirky little tunes that never found a place on the Hit Parade until, possibly, Friday evening.

After the show, party co-chairwoman Rivkin met Feinstein backstage and came out to report, “He’s so gracious and so charming. He just loved being here.” She added that Globe executive producer Craig Noel was “grinning ear to ear. He’s wanted to have the annual gala at the theater for 10 years, and tonight he was proven right--it’s been fabulous.”

The guest list include Peter and Peggy Preuss, Melissa and Michael Bartell, Blaine and Bobbie Quick, Tawfiq and Richel Khoury, Carolyn and Mark Yorston, George and Martha Gafford, Stephen and Lyn Krant, Terry and Alice Churchill, Arthur and Sophie Brody, Harry and Mary Todd, Ken and Dixie Unruh, Forrest and Patsy Shumway, Robert and Nancy McLeod, Bob and Dorothy Shapiro, Audrey Geisel, Bill and Barbara Fox, Jeff and Sandra Schafer, Luba Johnston, Ben and Sheri Kelts and Dan and Rita Grady.

If some of the 500 guests at the 20th annual Mercy Ball, given Saturday at the San Diego Marriott, seemed to swivel in their chairs without warning, it was because the ball’s theme urged them to constantly look ahead to Mercy Hospital’s 1990 Centennial while glancing over their shoulders at the 99 years the hospital has served San Diego.

This Janus-like approach suited chairwoman Lynn Silva, whose three children represent the fourth generation in her family to be born at Mercy. Many of the families present could claim similar long-term affiliations, and for that reason, the gala actually subordinated its traditional Mercy Ball title to a new name, the Mercy Generation Celebration.

Represented in the program by a “Tree of Life” logo whose canopied boughs sheltered a multiracial mix of patients and staff, the theme was meant to encompass the generations of San Diegans born or ministered to at the hospital.

Guests made frequent references to “Babes of Mercy,” the name commonly granted to graduates of the hospital’s busy nursery. In preparation for the centennial, Silva’s mother, Kay Rippee (who chaired the ball in 1973; the committee included four other mother-daughter teams) is heading the “Babes of Mercy” drive.

“We’re trying to locate and register every living person who was born at Mercy since 1890, and we’d sure like to find the oldest,” said Rippee. Thus far, about 15,000 persons have been registered; the drive ends with the 1990 Mercy Ball.

The guests were, of course, able to amuse themselves in the present, with diversions that began with a noisy silent auction of get-aways and grown-up toys and continued with dinner (served at tables set with red-and-gold Trees of Life), a refreshing minimum of speeches and dancing to both the Bill Green Orchestra and Signed, Sealed and Delivered. Auction proceeds were expected to raise the party net to more than $120,000, all of it earmarked for Mercy’s obstetrics and gynecology clinic.

The program book kept some guests so busy reading that they were late arriving on the dance floor. Its main attractions were pages of mystery photos of committee members in their infancy, many of them Babes of Mercy; a centerfold baby photo of businessman Robert Payne (who headed the city’s Super Bowl Task Force in 1988) and a copy of the hospital bill presented Lynn Silva’s parents following her 1948 birth. The total, which included her mother’s five-day stay at Mercy, came to $83.10.

Among the guests were hospital President Richard Keyser and his wife, Joan; Timothy and Kelly Dupont; Donald and Donna Guttman; Bob and Maria Ilko; Charles and Patsy Miller; Mark and Linda Saxon; Frank Silva; Mary Brito; Jim and Ruth Mulvaney; Betty Hubbard; Ruth Carpenter with Tom Fleming; Josiah and Rita Neeper; Paulette Gibson; James and Susan Merrill; Gordon and Sue Bartow; George and Jennette Cabot; Gary and Jan Kincannon; Dolly Ragan, and Paul and Melody Peterson.