Good Skates Are Also Good at the Plate

Forget skating. “Starlight Express” cast members were talking baseball when they hit Birraporetti’s on Tuesday after their debut at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

“Last week, we beat the cast of ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ 24 to 16!” said “Starlight’s” baseball coach, Ron DeVito, “Greaseball” in the musical that has an entire company on skates. “We’re hot.”

Precisely. The show recently broke box office records when it appeared at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. And cast members wowed TV audiences last week when they performed on “The Tonight Show.”

On Tuesday night, they had season subscribers applauding until their hands turned as red as the $40,000 costume “Electra” wore when he, uh, precipitated a spill in the second act.

Poor Eric Clausell. Portraying an electric train with tremendous style and speed, he missed a curve and caused a pileup. “His skates became attached,” sighed skating coach Michal Frawley. “It’s tough up there.”

“We had a spill when we played in St. Louis, too,” said Dwight Toppin, who played “Rocky II.” But they handled it with class, the same way they handled it in Segerstrom Hall. They hopped right up and kept on skating. The audience thought it was part of the act. “We call them our ‘highly professional spills,’ ” Toppin said with a grin.

The plot, you see, concerns a group of speeding “trains” competing in a madcap race across America. Who will win? The slick, state-of-the-art trains? Or an old steam locomotive, played by a hopeful and handsome “Rusty” (Sean McDermott)?

The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is about “the search to be the best,” said McDermott, whose sweet singing voice had women in the audience getting chills up their spines. “It’s about good versus evil and getting ahead the right way--by believing in yourself.”

Arts activists spotted in the opening night crowd: Henry and Renee Segerstrom (in a caramel colored fur); Janice and Roger Johnson; Ed and Floss Schumacher; Elaine and Bill Redfield; Georgia Spooner; Otto and Pat Strehlow; and Timothy and Susan Strader.

Pssst!: Besides attending a power breakfast on July 19 when his presidential library opens in Yorba Linda, former President Richard M. Nixon is set to attend a benefit that night at the Century Plaza Hotel. (What? A dinner in Los Angeles County to raise big bucks for a library in Orange County? Indeed. Insiders say the Disneyland Hotel’s vast ballroom was under consideration, but the location was ultimately deemed “not presidential enough.”) The big news is that Nixon will be accompanied at library events by his wife, Pat, and their daughters, Tricia Cox and Julie Eisenhower.

The hot ticket, however, is not the fund-raising splash for 1,000 at the Century Plaza. It’s the dinner for 200 that Nixon will stage at the Irvine Marriott the night before. The guest list will include Nixon cronies from around the country, including William Simon, his former secretary of the Treasury, and H. R. Haldeman, once his chief of staff.

Where will Nixon camp out when he comes to the county? Insiders are betting that it will be the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Dana Point and not Casa Pacifica, the San Clemente spread owned by Gavin Herbert that was once Nixon’s Western White House. . . .

Beverly and Bob Cohen, owners of the Newport Beach digs that once belonged to John Wayne, are taking their 130-foot yacht, the P’zazz, to the French Riviera for some summer frolic off Cannes. But not before they host a barbecue bash on April 24 at their bay-front home for Pierre Merli, mayor of Antibes, France. Seems the French Riviera city became a sister city to Newport Beach last year when Councilwoman Evelyn Hart and Mayor Ruthelyn Plummer visited the resort “to make it official,” Hart said. And, for the record: “We paid our own way,” Hart added.

Merli and about 13 other Antibes officials will gather at the Newport Beach home of Mary Ann and Len Miller for cocktails and appetizers and then cruise aboard the Miller yacht to the old Wayne manse for dinner. “We’re going to have country-Western music,” Hart said. “And a barbecue.”

Sam Goldstein, director of operations business management for Rockwell International in Newport Beach, is chairman of the dinner committee. (Rockwell has plants in Newport and Antibes.) On April 25, Rockwell will fete the Antibes contingent with a dinner at Club 33 in Disneyland. The following night, the group will have an official dinner--”where the mayors of Newport and Antibes will exchange pleasantries,” Goldstein said--at the Newporter Resort. Newport Beach is also a sister city to Cabo San Lucas in Baja and to Okazaki in Japan.