A Grand Night--and Setting--for Opera

N o black tie, warned the invitations to Saturday night’s “La Vie de Boheme” gala staged at the mansion of mortgage brokers Lil and William Knight in Peralta Hills.

Men attending the gala, sponsored by Opera Pacific’s Society of Founders, were asked to sport “summer French attire” at the affair, held alfresco at the couple’s chateau-style estate.

After all, this was a salute to the bohemian life--a la Puccini’s “La Boheme” (which opens Opera Pacific’s seventh season at the Performing Arts Center on Sept. 12)--even if the marble-floored mansion with its waterfall pool was about as far from the opera’s Parisian attic-apartment setting as you could get.

“We’d thought about imitating the opera’s Cafe Momus scene, making the look of the party more casual,” said gala chairwoman Ann McLean, who wore a plunging petticoat-dress by Travilla. “But we thought checkered tablecloths wouldn’t look right in this setting.”

So McLean and her co-chairwoman, Mary Raymond, dressed the gala tables in a black-tie motif--floor-length black linens topped with vases of white tulips, roses and orchids--and let their men relax.

David DiChiera, Opera Pacific’s general director, was grateful. “This is the perfect way to celebrate the first day of summer,” he said.

It hasn’t been an easy year for the opera company, DiChiera noted. “The recession has made everything more difficult. People are working hard to support the company but I know they are doing it with much greater sacrifice.”

Gala proceeds will go toward balancing this year’s (last season’s) budget. “We still owe about $100,000,” DiChiera said.

The 300 guests enjoyed a champagne reception in the home’s front courtyard before filing into a spacious back-yard area to dine on fare catered by Turnip Rose, bid on auction items and enjoy a recital of “La Boheme” favorites--”Mi chiamano Mimi,” “Che gelida manina,” among them--performed by the opera’s Overture Company.

“This is my favorite opera,” cooed Maxine Gibson, co-chairman with her husband, Bob, of the Society of Founders. “I love its ambience. It leaves such a beautiful picture of Paris in your mind.”

Said DiChiera: “ ‘La Boheme,’ with its beautiful sentiment of struggling young love, always pleases audiences. In the end, Mimi dies and Rodolpho is distraught, and we all sit there with a lumps in our throats no matter how many times we have seen it.”

Also among guests: Bill and Barbara Roberts (who have donated $50,000 to help underwrite “La Boheme”; Dorothy and Jim Conte; Barbara Flora; Diane and Roland Osgood; Roger Martin, manager of Chanel at South Coast Plaza (Chanel will stage a dinner, “Chanel at the Opera,” for 18 opera buffs in its boutique on Aug. 30 where cast members from “La Boheme” will perform); Sally Jac and Earl Schaefer; John Ortega (whose Newport Beach home was the site of the gala’s recent underwriting party); Kathleen Rhynerson; Donna Bunce; Hal and Jeanette Segerstrom; Carl Raymond; and Bob McLean.

“Godspell” gala: A performance of “Godspell” in the Founders Hall of the Performing Arts Center was the highlight of a benefit held last week to raise $5,000 for Allard Artists’ participation in an upcoming music workshop for disadvantaged high school students.

Allard Artists--headed by voice teacher and former Master Chorale director Maurice Allard--will provide the staff, administration and teaching materials for the July 6 through 17 workshop for 25 students.

“We made a proposal to the Center to combine forces with their facilities to do a free workshop for disadvantaged kids,” Allard said. “They bought the project and, with the Orange County Department of Education coming in to help us, we now have 18 kids signed up.”

Co-chairing the benefit were Christine Rhoades, Marla Patterson and Diana Sterling.

Mariette Hartley at Round Table: She found her father’s body after he committed suicide. Two weeks later, she saved her mother from the same fate. And the pain of it, actress Hartley told guests at a meeting of Round Table West at the Balboa Bay Club last week, almost killed her.

“I almost didn’t survive,” Hartley told about 200 guests. “It was 1963 and I was on the verge of a major career. But I went underground for several years, kept hitting bottom.”

What saved her was separating herself from her mother--”I had to do that,” she said--and reaching out for help. “If anyone out there is suffering, I say ‘Don’t isolate yourself!’ ”

What continues to heal her is her outreach to others who are in pain. “It gives my pain meaning,” Hartley said.

“I have a good friend, a nun for 30 years, who has given me the credo for my life: ‘One’s deepest wounds integrate and become one’s greatest power.’ ”

If she had the choice, she would choose to be born all over again, Hartley said. “I am totally committed to life. Because of my pain, I know the meaning of it, the process. If I had to write my life, I would never have written it this way, but I am grateful for it. I have come out the other side of grief into the light.”