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| Issue #24, September 8, 2006 |
GUILD HALL CELEBRATES ITS 75th WITH 75 STARS
Guild Hall in East Hampton celebrated its 75th Anniversary with a whole series of events this summer. The celebration climaxed last Saturday night with perhaps the biggest event of all, an evening called “Night of 75 Stars,” featuring 75 world famous performers paying tribute to Guild Hall in a series of skits, songs and comedy routines. The place was packed, in fact standing room only. But the evening was uneven. Some of the performances were wonderful. Some not so wonderful. But everybody had a terrific time.
Here were some of the highlights. It was dark in the audience and I didn’t write down the dialogue below. So it’s as I remember it.
Actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, he ninety-one and she eighty, did the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. The entire stage set consisted of a ladder, which Anne climbed. Eli stood below and sang her praises.
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. O, that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek.
Oh Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo.
This went on for some time. But then Anne Jackson noticed that Eli Wallach did not accompany one of his lines to her with a little jump.
“Let’s go back and do that again. I didn’t see the little jump.”
“I didn’t do the little jump.”
“Well, can we do it again?”
“I don’t want to do the jump.”
“But you added the jump. You said it gave the line a certain extra emphasis.”
“I don’t want to do the jump.”
“Stage manager? Where’s the stage manager?”
“In the back.”
“Stage Manager could you tell my partner here to do the little jump?”
“You know I’m a little old to be doing this little jump.”
“You’re not so old.”
“Well, I’m not sixteen.”
“I’m not sixteen, either.”
It went on and on. The crowd roared with laughter. I’m told Wallach and Jackson had performed this little skit before, last year at the Hampton Shakespeare Festival benefit. It was wonderful.
Alec Baldwin and Bob Balaban starred as Felix and Oscar in the opening scene of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, which had played here. The scene begins with four actors on the stage playing cards at a table, none of who are Felix or Oscar. They are all friends. Oscar arrives and joins the game. But where’s Felix? They fear he has killed himself, that he has been in an accident. This is not like him. Then somebody notes that Felix has just been thrown out by his wife of ten years. It just happened the night before. And then he shows up.
They make a fuss over him. Are you all right? Do you need anything?
“Are you in?” one of the card players asks.
“I’m in. I’ll just kill myself. I think what happened……. where’s page 34?”
Balaban, as Felix, is looking at his script. There is a page missing. He tries a few lines from page 35 and they don’t fit. He turns the script over and over.
The actors, all of whom are performing the scene but reading from scripts as you might at a rehearsal, now come over to give Balaban page 34. The pages are loose apparently. And so finally somebody finds page 34 and plops it down on the card table and Balaban says his line, and somebody else says their line, and now two people don’t have the script right. And unlike with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, this is for real. These pros really have screwed this up royally.
The scene limps along, papers are passed back and forth, and finally it comes to an end and all actors exit stage right. The crowd applauds politely.
And then Alec Baldwin reappears with one of the scripts and, laughing uncontrollably, walks to the footlights and hurls it into the audience where, high overhead it bursts apart to send individual pages wafting down on the theatergoers in the first dozen rows.
Comedienne Joy Behar was next to perform.
“This is my third summer out here. I love it here. And everybody wants me to exercise. I hate exercising. I hate it with a passion. I’d rather wear black in August than exercise.”
There is a pause. And then the house erupts into laughter. She’s wearing black.
“Everybody’s here. Steven Spielberg is here. Alec Baldwin is here. Kelsey Grammer is here. But there’s one person who isn’t here. Where is he? Anybody see Peter Cook?”
She is a very, very funny lady.
I felt the highlight of the evening was the classical performance given by the students of the Itzak Perlman Music School of Shelter Island. They played the last movement of Mendelsohn’s Octet for Strings. The students filed in carrying their instruments onto the stage and sat down on folding chairs set up horseshoe-fashion. There were seven of them.
And then Itzak Perlman himself came on carrying his violin. He walks slowly and awkwardly with two metal canes because his legs have been paralyzed for many, many years, and the seven students wait for him patiently. He says a few words to the audience and then asks some stagehands to come out with some rags to wipe off the stage in front of him so he won’t slip. There is champagne on the stage floor, from a dramatic splashing it in somebody’s face in the performance just prior, a skit by Claire Booth Luce from the 1940s. It’s cleaned. And so he sits down.
And then Perlman nods and this piece begins. It is at presto tempo, which means it is very fast and difficult. Perlman is playing First Violin, the lead, and he rushes through this very wonderful and exuberant movement with a blinding dexterity and brilliance. The other seven back him up. And the audience listens breathlessly as it heads for its final climax.
There is a lot happening here. Perlman, one of the most celebrated musicians in the world, is showing he can outplay his students. He plays with joy and delight. It is clear he loves what he is doing. The seven are in awe to be playing with the master. And it is clear now that he has set up this school — now in its eleventh year — because he loves playing with kids. It is an astonishing performance. And he gets a standing ovation.
Some of the performers tell the history of this venerable institution, mentioning some of the great performances given here and some of the great playwrights, actors, choreographers, set designers and musicians who created them. There is John Drew, after whom the theatre is named, Lionel Barrymore, Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse, Jimmy Kirkwood and Cy Coleman, etc. A Broadway show, just a few days from closing after a rocky start, was invited to spend a few weeks at the John Drew to get the kinks worked out, did, and came back to the City to run for 40 years. This was the Fantastiks. Reminiscences were offered by Mercedes Ruehl, Richard Adler, Tony Walton, Dina Merrill and Harris Yulin.
Leaving the theatre I was reminded of a special interesting experience I once had at Guild Hall.
It was in the 1970s and a stock company had done a rousing performance of the musical comedy How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and when it was over, I invited the whole cast to my house.
I lived in a small barracks affair on a 1/4 acre in Georgica at that time. But it was a warm night, and I figured if it spilled out into the yard so much the better, we’d manage. At 2 a.m., the cast left and myself and a few others cleaned up. Walking across the living room floor, however, it was impossible not to notice that the floor gave a rather disconcerting bounce at each step. What was going on?
This barracks had been at an army camp in the town of Brookhaven at one time, and after the war, a Lieutenant had bought it for a dollar and had it towed to this place where it was set on cedar posts. Clearly there was something wrong with the cedar posts.
I got a flashlight and right then, at 3 a.m., crawled under the barracks to have a look at the cedar posts. Sure enough, right under the middle of the living room, there was one that had been pounded further into the ground by the floor rafter. There was a space there of about a half inch. And that was the bounce. And then I remembered something. Just before the evening ended, the chorus line had performed this precision musical number in my living room, singing and dancing and stomping their way through.
I found an old axe, went back into the crawl space, and I shoved it into this open space. And that solved the problem.
Five years later, when I sold this house to move elsewhere, the axe handle was still down under there, doing its job. Perhaps it is still there today.
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