The Only Make Believe Gala Honored Anna Wintour and the Power of Theater
May you never have a child who spends time in a hospital for any significant duration. But if you do, may you be lucky enough to encounter an organization like Only Make Believe. I will never forget a very awful December, when one of my children was admitted for a week-long stay. We stepped onto another planet, where the parents all seemed flattened by their distress, and the children reduced to whatever was outlined on their medical charts.
That week, my child was listless and very sick, but also emotionally defeated by missing out on holiday celebrations. There would be a performance, one of the nurses told us one day, if he felt like going? Some ballet dancers were coming to visit. My preteen boy had never shown an interest in ballet, but we went, and I watched as members of the NYCB performed short pieces from The Nutcracker, then taught the children how they, too, could unfold like toy soldiers. A physical therapist had just visited my son’s room, engaging him in some tedious leg lifts that seemed to bore and annoy him; now he was using his whole body with a smile on his face that I hadn’t seen for days.
It’s cliché to say that there is power in play, but the phrase never rings truer than when you witness it transform, within minutes, a sick child. Last night, at Broadway’s Shubert Theater, supporters gathered to celebrate Only Make Believe, an organization that for 25 years has brought performers into hospitals, care facilities, and schools dedicated to serving children with disabilities. At a time when the world can often seem pretty grim, here was an occasion, the evening’s host John Oliver joked (in all seriousness), that we could all feel very good about.
The Gala was in honor of Dame Anna Wintour, who was awarded the James Hammerstein Award; Adam Meshel, the Head of Legal at Citi, who received the Founders Award for his lengthy service to the organization; and Shenoda Saeed and King Monroe, two participants in the program at the Harry Moore School. Shenoda, now 15, had performed with Only Make Believe since the age of four, and proudly proclaimed on stage his love of dancing. Before leaving the stage, he made sure that the audience gave him a rousing round of applause and took his bow with a grin.
After remarks by Executive Director Tamela Aldridge and Director of Programming Christopher Wilson, the evening proceeded with performances by Chris Jackson, who sany “Feelin’ Good”; Josh Groban, who sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water”; a song from the little known 1969 musical Coco written by Andre Previn (about Coco Chanel), performed with gusto by Brad Oscar; dancers from the contemporary opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones, choreographed by the extraordinary Camille A. Brown; and a duet between Darren Criss and Lena Hall of “Suddenly Seymour.” A highlight in the performance was a deeply moving rendition of “Dear Bill,” a ballad from Operation Mincemeat, performed by Jak Malone—at the special request of Wintour.
Before Wintour took the stage, she was introduced by married couple director Sam Gold and playwright Amy Herzog, themselves fixtures on Broadway. (Together they worked on the recent adaptation of Enemy of the People, and Herzog is the author of the stunning Mary Jane, an exquisitely moving work about a mother managing the care of her very sick child.) Their favorite performance of all time, they said last night, was one that took place in the children’s wing of a hospital that was treating their daughter, where a “definitely unlicensed" adaptation of Frozen was put on by the physical therapy department. There were costumes possibly purchased from a Halloween store, and “these PTs were giving it everything they had,” said Herzog. “And as theater professionals, we really wanted to say to them …”
“Don t quit your day jobs,” finished Gold. All joking aside, he continued, “We can tell you that the kind of joy through theater that Only Make Believe is dedicated to creating makes an enormous difference to sick and disabled kids, and to their families,” he continued.
It was precisely that difference that Wintour articulated when she took the stage and spoke of her own experience as a ten-year-old, witnessing Sir Laurence Olivier in Coriolanus at Stratford. “Seeing him in that role,” Wintour said. “I was hooked for life.” Her point, she continued, was that “theater is the most natural art form for a young person s imagination. And indeed, for a young person s hope.”
“Being here with all of you tonight gives me hope,” Wintour continued, “in the prospect of joy and community for a generation of children growing up in hard circumstances in a hard time. And it lifts my spirits about the future of this extraordinary art. If theater is to continue to survive and to grow over the decades ahead, it may be because a new generation, the generation that is now children, recognizes the value of the stage as a human instrument.”
Photo: Bruce Glikas1/14Josh Groban
Photo: Bruce Glikas2/14Darren Criss, Anna Wintour, Jak Malone, Josh Groban
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