Stars tread the boards for children

“I believe that all people who stand to profit from a war should be shot on the first day of it,” said the actor, drawing thunderous applause from the crowd. The material? Not an exhortation against invading Iraq but “The World of Nick Adams,” a play based on Hemingway short stories, set in 1915.

Jack Nicholson led the players as the narrator Hemingway and was surrounded by a “Who’s Who in Hollywood” cast: Matt Damon as the 19-year-old Adams who encounters some eccentric characters running away from Mom and his small-town roots; Julia Roberts and Annette Bening as bickering floozies; Gary Sinise and Danny DeVito as Little League thugs; Bruce Willis as a world-weary boxer.

Joining them were Tom Hanks, Kevin Kline, Brian Dennehy, Danny Glover, Edward James Olmos, Chris O’Donnell, Warren Beatty, Mena Suvari and Goldie Hawn -- and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who organized the Monday night fund-raiser held at a sold-out Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. Many of the actors had performed the piece last November at New York’s Lincoln Center.

It was not a full-scale play, but a staged reading, in which the actors sat behind music stands and walked around with scripts. Thirty-two members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by associate conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, performed incidental music composed by Aaron Copland, an admirer of Hemingway’s.

“When do you ever see a group like this in one place -- it’s like an Academy Award event,” said audience member Shirley Arconti of Beverly Hills. “Of course, I would have come just to hear Paul Newman read the phone book.”

What brought them together was the Painted Turtle, the latest of Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang Camps for seriously ill children. Located in Lake Hughes, an hour north of Los Angeles, it aims to open next year. Ticket sales, ranging from $40 to $500 for general seating and up to $2,500 for VIPs, will help.

It was Hemingway biographer and Newman business partner A.E. Hotchner who came up with the notion of turning a CBS teleplay he adapted in 1957 into a concert work. And, coming full circle, Newman played the same punch-drunk fighter he tackled in “The Battler,” a 1956 Nick Adams tale that aired on NBC, leading to the actor’s first successful movie, “Somebody Up There Likes Me.”

“Staged readings are usually done in someone’s apartment, a room of 20 people -- often to get backing,” said Jean Picker Firstenberg, chief executive of the American Film Institute. “It’s not easy to make them work in a [3,500-seat] theater like this. In any case, people will be very forgiving because the actors are donating their time. And because Newman and Woodward are artists committed to something beyond themselves.”

Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre, directed the Lou Adler-produced show when Arvin Brown, the former artistic director of New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, bowed out. With only a few hours for the actors to rehearse, he professed to be quite happy with the production.

“There are always things I’d change,” he said. “Coulda fixed this, coulda fixed that -- but those are insignificant. Though Nicholson hasn’t done a lot of stage work, he’s smart, you know his mind is alive and working. He’s also a wonderful listener and half of acting is listening.”

Suvari (“American Pie,” “Sonny”) admitted to “being in awe” of her high-profile colleagues and “terrified” of her first time on stage. Kline, she says, provided some hints on translating her feelings to the medium.

If she was unnerved by the lack of preparation time, DeVito dismissed the problem. “Many of us hadn’t been on ‘the boards’ in awhile,” he said, giving a British intonation to the term. “But, don’t forget, we had the book. We New Jersey guys can read.”

Autographing the shirt of a Hole in the Wall Gang camper (“the real star”) at the after-party, Hanks acknowledged some sleepless nights. Would the audience connect with such a scaled-back production? The broad accent required of his character, an Italian army officer, was less of a worry: “DeVito coached me backstage,” he said.

Lest anyone be diverted from the real thrust of the night, the event was framed by the Hole in the Wall Gang. A video, featuring an adolescent cancer patient, began the program. The same remarkably poised youngster spoke at the end of the show, on the heels of the prolonged standing ovation.

Carole King, a longtime supporter of the project, led a chorus of campers in “Hope,” a song with lyrics by Hotchner for which she wrote the music. “It’s a remarkable bunch of performers, but it’s always about the kids.”