Oscar winners Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts – who's sporting a surprising new blonde look – joined Matt Damon, Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and a host of other celebrities on stage in Manhattan on Monday night to perform a one-off reading of Ernest Hemingway’s The World Of Nick Adams.
Hollywood legend Paul Newman organised the Avery Fisher Hall event, a fundraiser for his Association of Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, and secured participation from some of Tinseltown’s biggest stars with a barrage of personal calls and letters.
Playwright A E Hotchner re-worked the play for the Manhattan bash from an earlier piece of his which had been performed just once in 1957. The work was subsequently lost for decades and found early this year in composer Aaron Copland’s papers in the US Library of Congress. (Copland wrote the score for the original staging.)
Good Will Hunting heart-throb Matt took on the lead role with support from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kevin Kline, Joanne Woodward and Brian Dennehy, among others. And while the cast received several standing ovations, some hadn’t arrived in New York until a few hours before the curtain went up, leaving director Frank Corsaro with little time for rehearsal.
“These things can turn out to be great evenings or great disasters,” said Hotchner, a co-founder of the camps. But judging from the star struck fans, many of whom stumped up $2,500 per ticket, the night was a huge success.
Julia and Meryl teamed up as a pair of prostitutes and nearly stopped the show with one particularly hilarious passage. And Kevin Kline scored cheers as a laughable drunk.
Paul and friends raised $1 million for the charity, which runs free summer camps for children with life-threatening diseases in the US and abroad. Several campers turned out for the event, and even serenaded the performers with a thank you tune as the curtain fell.
“It’s like they stepped off a movie screen just for us,” remarked 16-year-old Mallory Cyr, a camper from Connecticut who suffers from a rare blood ailment. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
