By Don Fisher ’75
The Mask and Wig Club of the University of Pennsylvania continues its 125th anniversary celebration with a black‐tie gala at the Annenberg Center on Saturday, November 16, 2013.
The Annenberg Center is on the Penn Campus, at 3680 Walnut Street, Philadelphia. One hundred twenty‐five years of the best in collegiate musical comedy will be celebrated by the Club, founded in 1889 by Penn undergrad Clayton Fotterall McMichael.
The Club’s anniversary year began in January with its 125th Annual Production Beautopia: A Face Odyssey, and continued with its Fall Show, A State of Confucian, which played to packed houses on campus, October 16‐19. The Club will usher in its 125th year with its 126th Annual Production debuting in January 2014, Wishful Sinking.
The gala evening will begin with cocktails in the Annenberg Center lobby, then a sit‐down supper on the Zellerbach stage, to be followed by a musical retrospective of a century‐and‐aquarter of music and mirth, “A (Necessarily Selective) Musical History of Mask and Wig.” Mask and Wig songs that became mid‐century standards, like “Daddy” and “Gypsy in My Soul” will be featured along with medleys of songs spanning a century‐and‐a‐quarter of Mask and Wig history. Current Wig undergrads and alumni of from the 1940s to the 2010s will participate in the extravaganza.
The evening will be hosted by Dan Gurksis ’77, Dean of the College of Arts, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ. Dr. Bryan Margerum ’88 and former Annenberg Center General Manager Steve Goff ’62 organized the evening’s celebration. Neil Radisch ’86, composer for Mask and Wig’s Annual Productions, is music director for the evening.
