Moses and the Masses Turn Out for Music Center Birthday Bash

Ask a Hollywood cabbie how to get to the Music Center and he might say, “Practice!”

Ask the kids from Chinatown’s Castelar Elementary School and you won’t get a punch line. “We walked up Alpine and turned left on Grand,” one sixth-grader explained Wednesday, providing a partial explanation as to why an estimated 10,000 people found themselves on Music Center Plaza at lunchtime Wednesday.

The occasion was the Music Center’s 25th birthday. In a silver anniversary year that has been sprinkled with exclusive black-tie soirees, this event was a decidedly Populist affair that featured, among other things, Charlton Heston doing a little Moses shtick.

In addition to 70 kids from Castelar, the crowd included more than 1,200 uniformed high school musicians, an army of office workers on their lunch break, scores of jurors from the courthouse next door and at least two theater lovers who rode in on an RTD bus.

“What I was trying to do was compare the number of people to the kids in band, and 10,000 is probably conservative,” said Music Center spokeswoman Kathy Bornstein.

The party was a way for the Music Center to show its appreciation for years of support from the Los Angeles community, Bornstein said. “We do a lot of big events and galas during the year. We’re really more and more geared to doing events for the community at large.

This party featured carrot cake, cartons of milk, jugglers and the USC Song Girls. Radio personalities Ken Minyard and Bob Arthur served as emcees, and, as at any good Southern California party, the talk turned to real estate. When the Music Center opened on Dec. 6, 1964, they noted, the average cost of a three-bedroom home in Los Angeles was $15,425.

The massive musical ensemble was composed of the USC marching band and 22 high school bands that had arrived from as far away as Mojave, Riverside and San Diego. They played selections from “A Chorus Line,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “The Music Man.”

Heston, featured as a guest speaker along with Carol Channing, recalled that when the Music Center was being planned more than 25 years ago, “some people thought it might dampen the performing arts here. Of course, that has not happened.”

Adding some Hollywood schmaltz to the occasion, Heston briefly reprised his role in the film “The Ten Commandments,” with the Lipchitz Fountain playing the role of the Red Sea. Holding Moses’ (prop) staff aloft, Heston intoned, “Who is on the Lord’s side? Let him come to me!”

The waters parted, of course. Just like at Universal Studios.

For revelers who didn’t have jobs to get back to or verdicts to decide, the Music Center opened the Mark Taper Forum to the public Wednesday afternoon for a free dress rehearsal of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.”