Download Here - livingartsnyc.com

Living Arts Inc.
is proud to present
AD
by
George Gershwin, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin
General Direction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WILL ROBERSON
Stage Director . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SUSAN WILLIAMS-FINCH
Choreographer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . KEILA CORDOVA
Scenic Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . JAMES FOUCHARD
Lighting Design. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . KATHRYN M. SCARPINO
Costume Design. . . . . . . . . . CANDACE DONNELLY & SUSAN WILLIAMS-FINCH
Conductor STEFAN KOZINSKI
Assistant Conductor ZOLTAN PAPP
The worldwide copyrights in the music of
George and Ira Gershwin® for this presentation are licensed by
the Gershwin Family.
PORGY and BESS is presented by arrangement with
TAMS-WITMARK MUSIC LIBRARY, INC.
560 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10022
GERSHWIN is a registered trademark and service mark of
Gershwin Enterprises.
PORGY and BESS is a trademark and service mark of
Porgy and Bess Enterprises.
Dear Music Lover,
It is with great pleasure and excitement that we are bringing back
this American classic to Australia and New Zealand in 2006. This
second tour of our production of George Gershwin’s masterpiece is
particularly rewarding to us.
We are proud to have assembled an exceptionally talented group of
singers
PETER KLEIN
AD
THE ROOTS OF
At one point, Gershwin considered writing an opera based on the
Yiddish play The Dybbuk. He signed a contract with the Metropolitan
Opera in 1929, but abandoned the project when he learned that the
rights to the play had already been committed to another composer. He
also planned a choral treatment of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. But
he kept returning to Porgy, the novel he had discovered in 1926,
inextricably drawn to its themes and characters and their potential for
extended musical expression.
During and immediately after World War I, many blacks migrated to
Harlem, where the Gershwin family had lived. Gershwin remembered
roller-skating as a boy past Baron Wilkins’ Harlem nightclub where
James Reese Europe, who had launched the fox trot with Vernon and
Irene Castle, played from time to time. The infectious rhythmic
excitement of Europe’s hand made a deep impression on Gershwin, and
he would often seek excuses just to sit outside the club and hear those
gifted artists play.
by Robert Kimball
“If I am successful it will resemble a combination of the drama and romance
of Carmen and the beauty of Meistersinger.” This was the challenge that
George Gershwin set for himself in July 1934 when he was already in the
midst of composing his opera Porgy and Bess in collaboration with his
brother Ira and the novelist DuBose Heyward. How well he succeeded
remains a fascinating subject of inquiry.
Like Carmen, Porgy and Bess has gorgeous songs that are an integral part
of its musical fabric. And in the world of Catfish Row and Kittiwah Island
it has, like Carmen, an exotic locale and atmosphere.
Arguably, the comparisons to Meistersinger are even stronger. The large
choral ensembles and dramatic scenes, the effective use of leitmotifs, the
Wagnerian scope and difficulty of its principal roles, and surely the fightscene fugue owe much to Meistersinger. Above all, there is a similar feeling
of community that links Catfish Row and Nuremburg.
Yet Porgy and Bess also owes much to American variations on the age-old
theme of tragic innocence. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, Porgy is like
“plain old Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole world”. Catfish
Row is a pre-industrial Eden. Bess is a beguiling and corrupting Eve.
Crown is the powerful, storm-braving God-like father, and Sporting Life is
the ‘happy-dust’-vending serpent. Porgy is a solitary hero with no family
and no social history, who is estranged from most of the normal ties of life.
He seems to exemplify what D. H. Lawrence described as “the myth of
America”, which goes “backwards from old age to golden youth . . . She
starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin”, he wrote. “And there
is a gradual sloughing off of the old skin towards a new youth.” Not young,
Porgy seems older and more isolated at the beginning of the opera than at
its poignant, ironic close when he sets out for New York in search of Bess.
His transformation is signalled in “the Buzzard Song” where he equates old
age and loneliness and proclaims, because of his new life with Bess, that
“Porgy’s young again”.
The opera’s fascinating odyssey began in the mid-1920s when South
Carolina-born Edwin DuBose Heyward (1885–1940) wrote the novel Porgy.
Heyward had derived the idea for the story from a newspaper article about
a maimed black man, named “Goat Sammy” or Samuel Smalls, who had
assaulted a woman and had tried to escape from the police on his goat cart.
Heyward drew upon his childhood familiarity with the Charleston, South
Carolina waterfront and his memory of such events as the hurricane of 1911
in recreating the teeming life of Catfish Row.
One night, during the out of town tryout of his 1926 musical Oh, Kay!,
George Gershwin read Porgy and was immediately attracted to its story
of a “Golden Age . . . where men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient,
beautiful city that time had forgotten before it destroyed”. He wrote to
Heyward of his desire to compose an opera based on it. That idea was set
aside because the author and his wife Dorothy were already dramatising
the book for what became a successful Theatre Guild production in 1927.
During the 1920s, when Gershwin wrote the great songs of Oh, Kay! as
well as “Liza”, “ ’S Wonderful” and many other ebullient anthems, the
American musical was experiencing a great flowering of talented
creators and performers. George and his lyricist bother Ira Gershwin
were standard-bearers in this golden age. Their best songs — elegant,
vital, sophisticated — endowed the musical theatre with a special grace
and distinction.
While George and Ira Gershwin uplifted and helped transform the
American musical theatre into a widely recognised art form, George also
fulfilled his long-nurtured boyhood ambition to be a composer of
symphonic music. “You must never forget when you write about George
Gershwin,” his close friend Irving Berlin once told me, “that the rest of us
were songwriters. George was a composer.”
Throughout his tragically short life, George Gershwin avidly immersed
himself in all music. While he constantly found the barriers between
popular or vernacular music and art or serious music to be rigid and
unbending, he believed that good music should be valued regardless of style
or category. The same man who wrote “The Man I Love”, “Nice Work If
You Can Get It”, “Fascinating Rhythm” and “They Can’t Take That Away
From Me” wrote Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F, An American in Paris,
Cuban Overture and, of course, Porgy and Bess.
As a boy, Gershwin had eagerly attended concerts by such modern
composers as Stravinsky, Leo Ornstein and Scriabin. In public he usually
performed only his own works. But when he was alone or with a few friends,
he frequently played music of Bach and Chopin. On one trip to Paris in the
1920s a major goal of his was to purchase all of Debussy’s piano music.
Arnold Schoenberg was a friend and Gershwin helped finance private
recordings of Schoenberg’s string quartets. When Gershwin returned from
Europe in 1928, he told reporters who met him at the pier that the high
point of his trip had been meeting Alban Berg and discovering his music.
Elliott Carter recently recalled that when he attended the American
premiere in Philadelphia of Berg’s opera Wozzeck, Gershwin sat near him.
Three years later, it was performed as 135th Street and again it was not a
success. Occasional revivals have partly dispelled the impression that it was
an immature work. But it is important because it shows that Gershwin had
an interest and a musical involvement in Negro life early on.
Carolina churches, homes, nightclubs, and prayer meetings, soaking up
everything. Heyward later described their fruitful working experience as
follows: “I imagine that in after years when George looks back upon this
time, he will feel that the summer of 1934 furnished him with one of the most
satisfying as well as exciting experiences of his career. Under the baking suns
of July and August we established ourselves on Folly Island, a small barrier
island ten miles from Charleston. James Island with its large population of
primitive Gullah Negroes lay adjacent, and furnished us with a laboratory
in which to test out theories, as well as an inexhaustible source of folk
material. But the most interesting discovery to me, as we sat listening to their
spirituals, or watched a group shuffling before a cabin or country store, was
that to George it was more like a homecoming than an exploration. The
quality in him which had produced the Rhapsody in Blue in the most
sophisticated city in America found its counterpart in the impulse behind the
music and bodily rhythms of the simple Negro peasant of the South.
George Gershwin was a man who gambled and risked everything in the
service of his art. His biggest gamble was Porgy and Bess. In March 1932
Gershwin wrote to Heyward of his keen interest in setting the play Porgy to
music: “I am about to go abroad in a little over a week, and am thinking of
ideas for new compositions. I came back to one that I had several years ago
namely Porgy and the thought of setting it to music. It is still the most
outstanding play that I know about the coloured people.”
“The Gullah Negro prides himself on what he calls ‘shouting’. This is a
complicated rhythmic pattern beaten out by feet and hands as an
accompaniment to the spirituals and is indubitably an African survival. I
shall never forget the night when, at a Negro meeting on a remote sea-island,
George started ‘shouting’ with them. And eventually to their huge delight
stole the show from their champion ‘shouter’. I think he is probably the only
white man in America who could have done it.”
Gershwin knew such influential black musicians as James P. Johnson and
Eubie Blake, studied for a time with Charles Luckeyth “Luckey” Roberts,
and greatly admired Thomas “Fats” Waller, Art Tatum and W. C. Handy.
One of many black musicians who befriended Gershwin was the talented
arranger and composer Will Vodery. When Gershwin left Remick’s (the
publishing company for which he demonstrated songs) in 1917 to try to make
it on his own, Vodery was one of the first to offer help and encouragement.
Later Gershwin called upon Vodery to orchestrate Blue Monday, his one-act
work about Negro life that had a brief exposure in George White’s Scandals
of 1922 before it was withdrawn for revisions.
Gershwin did not go to Europe. His father died on May 15, and five days
later he wrote to Heyward again when he learned that the operatic rights to
Porgy were “free and clear”. “Of course there is no possibility of the
operatic version’s being written before January 1933. I shall be around here
most of the summer and will read the book several times to see what ideas I
can evolve as to how it should be done. I think it would be wise for us to meet
either here or where you are several times, before any real start is made.”
During the next few months there was much correspondence between
Gershwin and Heyward over a suggestion that Jerome Kern and Oscar
Hammerstein turn Porgy into a musical for Al Jolson. Heyward, who was in
rather tight economic straits, was unsure of what to do. Gershwin wrote to
him (September 9, 1932) that “if you can see your way to making some ready
money from Jolson’s version I don’t know it would hurt a later version done
by an all-coloured cast”. He wrote to Heyward again (October 14, 1932): “I
really don’t think that Jolson would consider doing an operatic version as I
am quite sure that he would consider that out of his line. I have taken this
attitude because I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of your making some
money with your property at the present time, and also because I don’t
believe that it would hurt a serious operatic version in any way.”
The Jolson Porgy never happened. In early November 1933 the Theatre
Guild announced that Gershwin, Heyward and George’s brother Ira were to
write an operatic version of Porgy which it would produce.
Apparently, the Metropolitan Opera was interested in Porgy. George was
very friendly with the Met’s board chairman, Otto Kahn. And Mrs Ira
Gershwin recalls Ira saying that George and Kahn had spoken by telephone
about a Met Porgy. Kahn offered the possibility of two performances. But
George and Ira both felt that the culmination of all their effort should not be
only two performances.
On November 12, Heyward sent George the first scene. He wrote: “I am
offering a new idea for the opening of the scene as you will see from the script.
The play opened with a regular riot of noise and colour . . . What I have in
mind is to let the scene, as I describe it, merge with the overture . . . I think
it would be very effective to have the lights go out during the overture, so that
the curtain rises in darkness, then the first scene will begin to come up as the
music takes up the theme of jazz from the dance hall piano.”
Two weeks later Gershwin wrote to Heyward of his plan to visit Charleston,
telling him that he had not yet begun to compose the opera.
The first of his many visits to Charleston to work with Heyward took place
in December 1933. His longest stay was in the summer of 1934 when he and
his cousin, painter Henry Botkin, rented a place on Folly Island off the
Carolina coast. In search of inspiration for his music, Gershwin visited
On November 5 Gershwin wrote to Heyward that “I start and finish the
storm scene with six different prayers sung simultaneously. This has
somewhat the effect we heard in Hendersonville as we stood outside the Holy
Rollers Church.” He also informed him that “Ira has written the lyrics for
Porgy and Bess’s first duet (‘Bess, You Is My Woman Now’) and I really
think that this bit of melody will be most effective.”On December 17
Gershwin wrote to Heyward: “Here is an exciting piece of news. I heard
about a man singer who teaches music in Washington and arranged to have
him come and sing for me on Sunday several weeks ago. In my opinion he is
the closest thing to a coloured Lawrence Tibbett I have ever heard. He is
about six feet tall and very well proportioned
with a rich booming voice. He would make a
superb Crown and, I think, just as good a
Porgy. He is coming to sing for me again
during Christmas week. I shall ask the
Guild to take an option on his services.
“I put a piece on the piano. I had several things. ‘What is this?’ he wanted
to know. ‘This is an old Italian song, a classic, Lungi dal caro bene.’
‘What?’ he asked. I thought maybe he didn’t understand my Italian, so I
translated it for him. I was just naive enough to do all the right things, and
I didn’t know I was doing the right things.
The New York run of the Crawford production was more than twice as long
as the original and its post-New York tour was extensive. The first
European performance of Porgy and Bess took place in Copenhagen on
March 27, 1943. The Danish underground used recordings of “It Ain’t
Necessarily So” to interrupt German propaganda broadcasts.
“He used to tell that he’d been going around for a year and every Negro
would sing either ‘Glory Road’ or ‘Gwine to Heaven’ or ‘Ol’ Man River’ or
some Negro song. It was all right, but here comes this Negro singing an old
Italian song, classic as it was. But that’s what I knew and that’s what I loved.
I wasn’t putting on any act, I was being myself.
Even more noteworthy was the early 1950s revival which was seen not only
in America but also toured widely in Europe, playing among other places in
Italy’s La Scala, the Vienna Volksoper and the Palace of Culture in
Leningrad. It was this production that launched the career of Leontyne
Price. The company came to the Stoll Theatre in London in the autumn of
1952, where it played to packed houses until February 10, 1953.
“I sang about eight bars, and I was standing beside him. He said, ‘Do you
know this?’
‘Yes, I know it.
‘I want to look at your face when you sing.’
The singer was Todd Duncan. Nearly forty years later Duncan described
his feelings: “I had sung opera at an all-Negro opera company in the Mecca
Temple on 55th Street. In 1934 Olin Downes had told Gershwin that he
must hear me and a woman, Abbie Mitchell, who had sung Santuzza to my
Alfio.
“George Gershwin was then going around the country looking for his Porgy.
When they told him that I was teaching in a university, he said he didn’t
want any university professor to sing. But he’d been going to different
nightclubs all over the country; he told me that he heard a hundred Negro
baritones in a year’s time so he called me and asked if I would come and sing
for him.
“I just wasn’t very interested. I was teaching in a university in Washington,
and I thought of George Gershwin as being Tin Pan Alley and something
beneath me. So I told him that I couldn’t come this Sunday because I was
singing in a little church where I was soloist, and I refused the wonderful
man whom I came to love and revere. I said I could come the next Sunday.
So I went to New York and went up to his apartment at one p.m. He came
to the door himself and he asked, ‘Where’s your accompanist?’ I didn’t
know anything about New York ways. I said, ‘Accompanist? Can’t you
play?’ ‘Well, I play a little,’ he said. He blinked his eyes. ‘If you can’t play
it, I’ll play for myself,’ I told him. ‘I’ll try to play for you, I’ll try,’ he finally
said.
“So I went around in the bow of the piano, and he played it, and looked at
me while I was singing. He had memorised it that quickly! I sang the same
eight bars, and he stopped me and asked, ‘Will you be my Porgy?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know whether I could or not, I’d have to hear your
music.’
“He laughed, ‘Well, I think we can arrange for you to hear some of my
music. Would you come back next Sunday and sing for some other people?’
‘I can’t afford it,’ I told him. ‘I just can’t afford to come back up here. I
would like to.’
“He said, ‘Well, how much would you like? How much would it cost?’
‘It would cost me thirty-five or forty dollars.’
‘Would you accept it from me?’ He wrote out a cheque to me and signed it,
saying, ‘Please accept this, and I’ll expect you next Sunday at the same
time.’
“The following Sunday, I took my wife with me with that forty dollars. We
got there at one o’clock, and also waiting for the elevator was a man with
striped trousers, dressed quite well. He had a cane and there was a girl with
him. ‘Are you this damned genius that George has got us all coming to
hear?’ he said. That made me mad. I said, ‘I beg your pardon.’ He said,
‘You’d better be God-damned good. George is pulling me out of the country.
He woke us all up and got us all here to hear you.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s
wonderful. I certainly hope you like my singing.’ He was Lawrence
Langner. The woman was Theresa Helburn. The whole board of the Guild
— they were all there!
“I was supposed to sing three or four songs. I think I sang thirty! I sang
opera, I sang Negro spirituals, I sang German lieder, French chansons. We
just had a wonderful time. I sang an hour, an hour and a half. Then we had
some drinks and a little food. Then George said, ‘Now we’re all going
upstairs to my workroom.’ He called Ira and his wife across
the street, and they came over, and he got out Porgy and
Bess, and he and Ira stood there with their awful,
rotten, bad voices and sang the whole score.
“When we started the opening music, I said to myself: ‘All
this chopsticks — it sounds awful.’ I looked at my wife and
said quietly, ‘This stinks.’ They went on and sang ‘Seven,
eleven’, with those awful voices. He just kept playing; they
kept singing. He turned around and grinned. The more they
played, the more beautiful I thought the music was. By the
time twenty minutes or a half hour had passed I just thought I
was in heaven. These beautiful melodies in this new idiom — it was
something I had never heard. I just couldn’t get enough of it.
“He got into the second act and he turned around to me and said,
‘This is your great aria. This is going to make you famous.’ I said,
‘Yes?’ He said, ‘Listen hard.’ He started off — ump-pah ump-pah.
And I just thought ‘Aria?’ It was the banjo song, ‘I Got Plenty
o’Nuttin’ — the song I’ve sung all over the world for nearly forty years.
And to think that man knew that was the song I would sing all over the
world. It was a little ditty, but so infectious and so beautiful. Well, they
finally finished, and when he ended with ‘I’m on My Way’, I was crying. I
was weeping.”
It took Gershwin 20 months to compose and orchestrate the opera. The
orchestrations were begun in late 1934 and were finished in September
1935. The world premiere at Boston’s Colonial Theatre was on September
30 and the New York opening was at the Alvin Theatre on October 10.
Alexander Smallens conducted. Rouben Mamoulian, who had staged
Porgy, the play, directed. Anne Brown, a 22-year-old Juilliard graduate,
was Bess. Ruby Elzy sang the role of Serena. Warren Coleman portrayed
Crown. Eva Jessye’s Choir had many important assignments. The revered
composer J. Rosamond Johnson was Lawyer Frazier, Ford Buck was
Mingo, and his partner, the great vaudeville and musical comedy star, John
W. Bubbles, was Sporting Life.
Porgy and Bess ran for 124 performances at the Alvin, closing there on
January 25, 1936, then touring until March. But it wound up losing its
entire $70,000 investment. The critical reaction was mixed, and in 1935 a
theatrical production that ran for 124 performances was considered a box
office failure. Still, 124 successive performances of a single opera in New
York in a single season is surely success of a high order.
After the New York opening, Gershwin had written the following defence of
his work: “It is true that I have written songs for Porgy and Bess. I am not
ashamed at writing songs at any time so long as they are good songs. In
Porgy and Bess I realised that I was writing an opera for the theatre and
without songs it could be neither of the theatre nor entertaining from my
viewpoint.
“But songs are entirely within the operatic tradition. Many of the most
successful operas of the past have had songs. Nearly all of Verdi’s operas
contain what are known as ‘song hits’. Carmen is almost a collection of song
hits. Of course, the songs in Porgy and Bess are only a part of the whole . .
. I have used symphonic music to unify entire scenes.”
Gershwin’s faith in his opera never wavered. On January 26, 1937 he wrote
to Heyward from California, where he and Ira were working on film scores:
“I am giving two concerts on February 10 and 11 with the Philharmonic
Orchestra in Los Angeles and we are doing some of the Porgy music. We are
having Todd Duncan come out to sing a few of the songs and Alexander
Smallens to conduct. This might whip up some enthusiasm for picture
possibilities on the part of the studios who, as you know, are keen about it,
but slightly afraid on account of the colour question. However, I’m sure it’s
only a matter of time when the opera will be done in that form as the music
is constantly being played and the enthusiasm for it is great on all sides.
“How about planning another opera or operetta for the future? I am sure
you could turn out a grand book and I am very anxious to start thinking
about a serious musical. So, put your mind to it, old boy, and I know you
can evolve something interesting.”
Less than six months later George Gershwin was dead. Heyward died in
1940. Ira, alone of the trio, lived long enough to witness the worldwide
triumphs of the opera.
A series of revivals, beginning with the Merle Armitage presentation in
California in 1938 and the Cheryl Crawford prodthe opera. The Crawford
production introduced a practice of replacing much of the recitative with
dialogue. Jean Dalrymple, who worked on that production, said that a
major stumbling block for the opera was the great difficulty and high cost
of rehearsing the chorus. Replacing the recitatives helped make it
economically viable.
In 1976 the Metropolitan Opera considered and then abandoned plans for
a bicentennial-year Porgy and Bess. But that year Sherwin M. Goldman
and the Houston Grand Opera mounted a full-length operatic Porgy, while
Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra with a distinguished group of
soloists, including Willard White as Porgy and Leona Mitchell as Bess,
made the first complete recording of the score. Then, on February 6, 1985,
more than fifty years after the discussions about a Met Porgy between Otto
Kahn and the Gershwins, the Metropolitan Opera offered its first Porgy
and Bess. And then Glyndebourne!
When we think of the first operas of Bizet (Le docteur Miracle), Wagner
(Die Feen), R. Strauss (Guntram), Verdi (Oberto) or Mozart (La finta
semplice), it makes Gershwin’s achievement seem all the more remarkable.
For Porgy and Bess, surely one of the very greatest of all first operas, has
taken its place alongside Carmen and Die Meistersinger on the major
operatic stages of the world.
© Robert Kimball, 1989
Robert Kimball, a musical
theatre historian,
a co-author with Alfred Simon
of The Gershwins.
SYNOPSIS
AD
PORGY AND BESS is based on the DuBose Heyward novel set in Charleston’s famed Catfish Row. It tells the moving
story of a cripple, Porgy, who witnesses a murder during a dice game and later gives shelter to the murderer’s woman,
the beautiful, haunted Bess. The Catfish Row community is opposed to the union, but Porgy and Bess make each
other happy, and their happiness only increases when they take in a child orphaned by a hurricane. Their happiness
is brief, however, for the murderer, Crown, returns for Bess, and Porgy, defending his family, kills him. The police
detain him for questioning but never dream that a cripple could be the killer, so Porgy returns triumphantly to the
Row. The triumph turns to tragedy, however, when he learns that, while he was away, Sportin' Life, the dope pusher,
seduced Bess with "happy dust" and took her away to New York City to resume, it is implied, her career as a prostitute.
PORGY AND BESS is recognised as an American masterpiece, a story that entwines pride, prejudice, pathos and
passion through a jazz and blues influenced score. Originally billed as a “Folk Opera”, PORGY AND BESS introduced
classic Gershwin songs like “Summertime”, “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So”, as well as
magnificent and enthralling choruses that stunned music and drama critics alike at its premiere in 1935.
THE GULLAH LANGUAGE
The language of PORGY AND BESS, the Gullah language, is a Creole blend of English and African languages. It was born
on Africa’s slave coast and developed in the slave communities of the coastal south: South Carolina and Georgia. The
Gullah people live in small farming and fishing communities along the Atlantic coastal plain and on the chain of Sea
Islands, which run parallel to the coast. Because of their geographical isolation and strong community life, the Gullah have
been able to preserve their African cultural heritage through their language, music, arts, their skills and their foods.
The Gershwins
In 1924 with Lady Be Good, starring Adele Astaire, Ira Gershwin
joined George as lyric writer for his songs and their collaboration
continued generally unbroken until George’s death in 1937. The years
were marked by a long string of international musical comedy
successes, starring such notables, in addition to the Astaires, as
Gertrude Lawrence, Marilyn Miller, Eddie Foy, Jr., Ruby Keeler,
Jimmy Durante, Duke Ellington, Ethel Merman, William Gaxton,
Victor Moore and many others.
At the same time, he was devoting his boundless talents to serious —
and almost equally popular — compositions such as the Concerto in F,
Five Preludes for the Piano, the immortal An American in Paris,
Cuban Overture — and finally his supreme triumph, Porgy and Bess.
The idea of Porgy and Bess as a musical drama — as a native American
folk opera — was born one night in October, 1926 when George
Gershwin reached for a recently published novel on his night table,
hoping to relax and fall asleep. Instead, at 4 a.m. he was writing
DuBose Heyward, the author of Porgy, suggesting they collaborate on
a musical version of the novel.
In the 38 short years of his life, George Gershwin did more than any
other composer to make American music felt throughout the world.
From the music hall to the concert hall, his compositions, stamped with
the authentic hallmark of creative genius, have assured George
Gershwin a place among the musical immortals of the world.
Born in Brooklyn on September 26, 1898, George Gershwin was the
second of four children — almost two years younger than his brother,
and later his collaborator, Ira. When he was about 12, his parents
bought a piano for Ira’s lessons, but it was George who monopolised it.
A few years later, the composer-pianist, Charles Hambitzer, who
became his teacher and, according to Gershwin, ‘the first great musical
influence in my life’, wrote of him, ‘The boy is a genius, without a
doubt.’
But genius must eat — and genius was most anxious, again in
Hambitzer’s words ‘to go in for this modern stuff, jazz and what not’.
So, while still 15, George left high school to become probably the
youngest piano pounder in New York’s famed Tin Pan Alley — plugging
other writers’ songs as he composed his own in his mind, making player
piano rolls for less than $5 apiece, pushing himself irresistibly to fulfil
his destiny.
His first published song, in 1916, “When You Want ’Em, You Can’t Get
’Em”, netted him exactly $5 in royalties. His second, “The Making of a
Girl”, brought him a 40% increase — a total of $7.
But within three years, George Gershwin, not yet 21, was the composer
of a solid Broadway musical comedy success, La La Lucille, and within
another year had written, with Irving Caesar, the song “Swanee” which
Al Jolson’s singing in his revue, Sinbad, catapaulted into sales of over
a million records, and was writing the score for George White’s
Scandals of that year, as he did for the next four.
Before he was 25, George Gershwin was one of Broadway’s outstanding
musical comedy composers with a long string of smash hits to his credit.
On November 11, 1923, he made his first appearance as a pianist and
composer at Aeolian Hall in New York, and February 12, 1924, marked
the first performance of his famous Rhapsody in Blue which he
composed for a serious all-jazz concert presented by Paul Whiteman.
Over seven years went by — during which Dorothy and DuBose Heyward
adapted the novel into the highly successful Theatre Guild play of the same
title — before George Gershwin was able to begin actual composition of the
music for Porgy and Bess. He spent months in and about Charleston, South
Carolina, soaking up the atmosphere of the city and of nearby James
Island, where the Gullah Negroes still preserved their old traditions and
songs. He observed the singing, the stomping, the ‘shouting’ of the prayer
meetings and the intricate but natural, even primitive, rhythms of the
melodies which blended powerfully into prayer, and to it he added the
musical genius which made him unique among American composers.
On October 10, 1935, almost nine years to the day after the idea was born,
Porgy and Bess opened in New York City to the thunderous applause of the
first night audiences and the reserved approval of the New York critics —
a critical attitude which, in the decades since that time, has changed to one
of unreserved acclaim.
In August, 1936, George and Ira Gershwin, who had first been briefly in
Hollywood during 1931, returned there. A little less than a year later, while
working on the score of The Goldwyn Follies, the incandescent flame that
was the genius of George Gershwin went out. On Sunday, July 11, 1937,
George Gershwin died of a brain tumour on the operating table at Cedars
of Lebanon Hospital.
AD
AD
CAST
- IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE CLARA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kearstin Piper Brown, Heather Hill
MINGO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kendrew Amir Heriveaux
SPORTIN' LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ronn K. Smith, Tyrone Stanley
JAKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marvin Lowe, Jarrett Ali Boyd, Larry J. Giddens, Jr.
Place: Charleston, South Carolina
Early 1930’s
ACT ONE
SCENE 1: Catfish Row, a Summer Evening
Summertime. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clara
A Woman is a Sometime Thing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jake and Company
They Pass By Singing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Porgy
Crap Game Fugue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Orchestra and Company
SERENA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theresa Hamm-Smith, Stephanie Beadle,
Anne Fridal, Michelle Owens
ROBBINS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jarrett Ali Boyd, Marlon de Bique
JIM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thomas R. Beard, Jr., Earl Wellington Hazell, Jr,
PETER (The Honey Man) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clinton Ingram
LILY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeanette Blakeney, Lydia Ledgerwood
MARIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephanie Beadle, Anne Fridal, Sheryl Shell
PORGY . . . . . . . . . Cedric Cannon, Richard Hobson, Thomas R. Beard, Jr.
CROWN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Finch, Larry J. Giddens, Jr.
BESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jerris Cates, La-Rose Saxon , Kearstin Piper Brown
DETECTIVE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robert L. Hoyt
SCENE 2: Serena's Room, the following night
Gone, Gone, Gone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Company
Overflow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Company
My Man's Gone Now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Serena and Company
Leavin' For de Promis' Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bess and Company
SCENE 3: Catfish Row, a month later
It Take a Long Pull . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jake and Men
I Got Plenty of Nuttin' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Porgy and Company
Struttin' Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maria
Bess, You is My Woman Now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Porgy and Bess
Oh I Can't Sit Down . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Company
SCENE 4: Kittiwah Island, evening of the same day
It Ain't Necessarily So . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sportin' Life and Company
What You Want With Bess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bess and Crown
UNDERTAKER . . . . . . . . Larry J. Giddens, Jr., Earl Wellington Hazell, Jr,
ANNIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carmen Keels, Angela Owens
STRAWBERRY WOMAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeanette Blakeney, Heather Hill
Mary Johnson, Carmen Keels, Angela Owens
CRABMAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marlin Williford, Jr.
RESIDENTS OF CATFISH ROW
(Fishermen, children, stevedores, basket weavers, vendors, etc.)
Thomas Beard, Jeanette Blakeney, Jarrett Ali Boyd, Marlon deBique,
Anne Fridal, Earl Hazell, Kendrew Amir Heriveaux, Heather Hill,
Clinton Ingram, Mary Johnson, Carmen Keels, Lydia Ledgerwood,
Angela Owens, Michelle Owens, Sheryl Shell, Tyrone Stanley, Marlin Williford
UNDERSTUDIES
CLARA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carmen Keels
MINGO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marlon de Bique
SPORTIN’ LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marlon de Bique
JAKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Earl Wellington Hazell, Jr,
ROBINS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marlin Williford, Jr.
JIM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jarrett Ali Boyd
PETER (The Honey Man). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marlin Williford, Jr.
LILY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michelle Owens, Sheryl Shell
MARIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeanette Blakeney
PORGY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Finch, Marvin Lowe
CROWN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Hobson
CRAB MAN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marlon de Bique
INTERMISSION
ACT TWO
SCENE 1: Catfish Row, before dawn, a week later
Dr. Jesus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Serena
The Vendors Call . . . . . . . . . . . . . Strawberry Woman, Crabman, Honeyman
I Loves You Porgy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bess and Porgy
SCENE 2: Serena's room, the same night
Oh, De Lawd Shake de Heavens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Company
A Red-Headed Woman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Crown and Company
SCENE 3: Catfish Row, the next dawn
Clara Don't You Be Downhearted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Company
SCENE 4: Catfish Row, a day later
There's A Boat That's Leavin' Soon for New York. . . . . . . . . . . . Sportin' Life
SCENE 5: Catfish Row, a week later
Where's My Bess? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Porgy, Serena, Maria
I'm On My Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Porgy and Company
JERRIS CATES
LA-ROSE SAXON
KEARSTIN PIPER BROWN
CEDRIC CANNON
RICHARD HOBSON
THOMAS R. BEARD, JR.
Bess
Bess
Bess / Clara
Porgy
Porgy
Porgy / Jim
Soprano, Jerris Cates, has been singing for
audiences across the United States and Europe.
She made her debut as Bess in Hamburg and
Frankfurt, Germany with the New York Harlem
Theatre International Tour of Porgy and Bess.
She also appeared in Porgy and Bess in Bregenz,
Austria in the summer of 1997. Some of the other
roles Ms. Cates has performed are Puccini’s
Suor Angelica, Turandot, as well as Electra in
Mozart’s Idomeneo. Ms. Cates has also given
recitals throughout the United States, France
and South America. She received her Bachelor
of Music in Education from Howard University
and continued her education at the Peabody
Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland.
La-Rose Saxon's singing has taken her across the
United States and around the world, appearing in
major opera houses throughout Europe. Ms. Saxon
in a native of South Carolina and graduate of Bennett
College in Greensboro, North Carolina. She received
a master’s degree in vocal music from Manhattan
School of Music. Ms. Saxon's performances have
been numerous. She has been an outstanding Bess in
the opera Porgy and Bess, having performed this
music of Gershwin many times, including a brilliant
performance with the Phoenix Symphony and the
Frankfurt Opera. She has toured with this role
throughout the United States, Europe, Japan,
Australia and New Zealand. Her other operatic roles
include Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro, Miss
Silverpeal in The Impresario, Monica in The
Medium, Nedda in Pagliacci and Frasquita in
Carmen. She has performed the title role in Scott
Joplin's Treemonisha at Town Hall in New York City
and with The Birmingham Opera, which critics in
attendance gave overwhelming reviews, and
considered her dramatic ability as strong as her well
trained voice. Ms. Saxon is also a principal solo artist
with National Opera Ebony. In conjunction with this
company she has been featured with the Saskatooon
Symphony, the Sinfoniuhljomsveit Symphony in
Iceland and the Goeteburg Opera in Sweden. Ms.
Saxon utilised her talents with The New York City
Opera's education program performing several roles.
Her performances have not been restricted only to
the world of Opera, she has performed in the OffBroadway production of A Ballad For Brimshire
directed by Irving Burgie and Broadway's Tony
Award winning Jelly's Last Jam directed by George
C. Wolf. She has appeared as guest soloist at the
Pushkin Festival, Moscow as well as performing with
the Polish Radio Orchestra. Ms. Saxon has
performed many recitals and conducted master
classes throughout the country. She also performs on
a regular basis with pianist Leon Bates and husband
Cedric Cannon in concert performances of Gershwin
on Broadway and Gershwin by Request. She
recently performed in New York City's Verdi
Marathon where she performed from the Operas Il
Corsaro, Alzira and Giovanna D'Arco with The
Touring Opera Company of New York. She is also a
trained dancer, having performed with the
Greensboro Civic Ballet Company and The Ned
William's Dance Troupe in New York City. Ms. Saxon
is presently on the faculty of the Harlem School of the
Arts in New York.
American soprano Kearstin Piper Brown has
appeared in critically acclaimed opera, oratorio,
musical theatre, and recital performances
around the world. Her operatic credits include
Countess Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro, Clara
in Porgy and Bess, Musetta in La Bohème, the
title role in Dido and Aeneas, Tatyana in Eugene
Onegin, and Gretel in Hansel and Gretel. Miss
Brown has been a resident artist with Opera
Colorado and Dayton Opera. She appeared with
the Cedar Rapids Concert Chorale and
Orchestra in a performance of Vaughan William’
Dona Nobis Pacem, a tribute to legendary bassbaritone William Warfield. Other concert credits
include Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Haydn’s
Nelson Mass, Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate, and
the Bach Cantata 51. Miss Brown has also been
featured in solo recitals across the United States
and Bermuda.
Renowned for his versatility as a performer,
American baritone Cedric Cannon is equally at home
on the operatic, musical theatre and concert stages.
Since his professional concert debut with the
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Cedric has
appeared with many of the world’s orchestras in a
variety of programs, The Filarmonica De
Montevideo (Uraguay), The Illinois Philharmonic,
The Polish Radio Orchestra, Oakland, Savannah,
Springfield, Eastern Connecticut, Saskatoon
(Canada), Pottstown and the Reykjavik (Iceland)
Symphonies. Cedric also appeared as a guest soloist
at the Pushkin Festival, Moscow and The Desert
Foothills Musicfest. He performs regularly with
celebrated pianist Leon Bates and wife La-Rose
Saxon in concert performances of Gershwin on
Broadway and Gershwin by Request.
Richard is known for the "dramatic persona" he
brings to his performances. He has sung roles at
The Metropolitan Opera. Mr. Hobson has
appeared at the Met every since season his debut
there in 2001. He has appeared in Madama
Butterfly, Boris Godunov, Die Frau Ohne
Schatten, Dr. Faustus, Le Rossignol and Lulu.
Mr. Hobson has also sung at The New York City
Opera as Porgy in Porgy and Bess, Count
Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro, and Zuniga in
Carmen. Mr. Hobson was invited to Milan, Italy
to sing in Franco Zeffirelli's new production of
Aida where he sang Amonasro. Other companies
have included The Dallas Opera, Baltimore
Opera, Austin Lyric Opera, Washington Opera,
Toledo Opera, Nashville Opera, New York
Grand Opera and The Mississippi Opera.
Thomas is from Fayetteville, North Carolina and
now resides in Washington, DC. He recently
completed 2 years as a resident artist with the
Placido Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program of
the Washington National Opera. Along with 8 other
young artists, were chosen from 6 nations
personally by Placido Domingo. During this past
year he served as the only Baritone young artist and
the first African American male. Thomas received
his Bachelor of Science Degree from Winston-Salem
State University where he began his formal vocal
training with D’Walla Simmons-Burke.
His talents have been seen on the musical theatre
stage throughout North America, Asia and Europe.
He played the roles of Hamilton Lightfoot and
Menuki in the Off-Broadway production of In
Dahomey, opposite Shirley Verrett. Other theater
credits include his role of Old Deuteronomy in Cats
in Hamburg, as well Pish-Tush in The Mikado,
Husky Miller in Carmen Jones, Billy Bounce in the
New York premiere of Leroy Jenkins’ jazz opera
Three Willies, ‘Caid in Fangs with the New York
Musical Theater Group, The Governor/Innkeeper in
the national tour of Man of La Mancha, Escamillo in
a concert version of Carmen, Ben in The Telephone
Booth with National Opera Ebony and starred as the
Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance with The
New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players. He made his
Broadway debut as Sir Sagramore in the Music Fair
production of Camelot starring Robert Goulet.
Mr. Hobson’s repertoire includes the title role in
Rigoletto, Amonasro in Aida, Count di Luna in Il
Trovatore, Escamillo in Carmen, Iago in
Othello, Don Carlo in La Forza del Destino,
Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoor, Scarpia in
Tosca, Marcello in La Bohème, Sharpless in
Madama Butterfly, Tonio in I Pagliacci, Alfio in
Cavalleria Rusticana, George in Of Mice and
Men, Egberto in Aroldo, Rodrigo in Don Carlo
and Josiah in Harriet: The Woman Called Moses
by Thea Musgrave.
In Chicago, Miss Brown received a “Best Leading
Actress in a Musical” nomination from the Black
Theater Alliance for her role as Sarah in
Ragtime with Light Opera Works. Recently, she
made her Washington, DC theatre debut in Tony
Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, or
Change.
Miss Brown has received awards and prizes from
competitions with the Denver Lyric Opera Guild,
Annapolis Opera, the Bel Canto Foundation,
and the American Friends of Austria, where she
won first prize. Miss Brown received her
Bachelor of Arts degree from Spelman College in
Atlanta, Georgia and completed her Master of
Music degree at Northwestern University’s
School of Music in Evanston, Illinois. She has
also studied at the International Institute for
Vocal Arts in Chiari, Italy.
He has performed with the Oakland Opera’s
productions of The Barber of Seville, Madame
Butterfly and La Bohème as well as Silvio in
Pagliacci with Opera Nova. Cedric performed with
the San Francisco Pocket Opera where he debuted
the title role of Eugene Onegin, Caspar in Der
Freischütz and the role of Lord Cecil in Mary Stuart.
He has performed in productions of Porgy and Bess
with the Houston Grand Opera in the role of Jake.
Grand Rapids Opera, Edmonton Opera, Carolina
Opera, The Piedmont Opera and New York City
Opera in the role of Crown, Metropolitan Opera in
the role of Robbins and sang his first Porgy at the
Frankfurt Opera singing with the New York Harlem
Opera. Since then he has sung the role of Porgy
throughout North America, Great Britain, Europe,
Ireland, Japan, Australia and New Zealand with
Living Arts international and The New York Harlem
Opera. His television and film credits include Raw
Nerve, Cosby, Oz, All My Children, As the World
Turns and Another World.
He has performed as the bass/baritone in such
oratorios as Handel’s Messiah, Verdi’s Requiem,
Fauré’s Requiem, The Ordering of Moses (Detts),
Magnificant (Pergolesi), and The Seven Last Words
of Christ (Dubois).
Thomas made his Operatic Debut as Bonzo in the
Muncipal Opera Company of Baltimore’s Madame
Butterfly (1999). Since then, he has appeared with
various companies as Marcello in La Bohème,
Papageno in The Magic Flute, Escamillo in
Carmen, the title role in Gianni Schicchi, Count di
Luna in concert excerpts of Il Trovatore, and
Crown, Porgy, and Jake in excerpts from Porgy
and Bess. A member of The Washington Opera, he
has performed with the Company over 90 times,
including its recent tour of Japan. Thomas most
recently made his Pittsburgh Opera Theatre debut
in there recent World Premiere of the jazz opera,
Just above my head and debuted with the
International Opera of Rome as Colline (La
Boheme) and Il Commendatore (Don Giovanni). In
November of 2002 Thomas made his John F.
Kennedy Center debut as Corporal Morrel in
Carmen Jones staring Vanessa Williams and
conducted by Placido Domingo. He also just
recently performed his debut of Giorgio Germont in
the Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz
program’s performance of La Traviata directed by
Marta Domingo.
While at the Washington National Opera, Thomas
has covered/understudied the roles of Gerard &
Mathieu in Giordano’s Andrea Chenier, and Count
di Luna in Il Trovatore. In January, 2005 he
covered the role of Senator Raitcliffe in the world
premiere of Democracy by Scott Wheeler and
understudied the role of Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca.
As a member of the Domingo-Cafritz program,
Thomas has performed for several Senators at the
Senate, Governors and the like. More importantly,
he has performed for the First Lady Laura Bush as
a guest at the White House.
STEPHEN B. FINCH
LARRY J. GIDDENS, JR.
THERESA HAMM-SMITH
STEPHANIE BEADLE
ANNE FRIDAL
MICHELLE D. OWENS
Crown
Crown / Jake / Undertaker
Serena
Serena / Maria
Serena / Maria / Resident of Catfish Row
Serena / Resident of Catfish Row
Stephen B. Finch, an actor, singer, and director,
has received rave reviews on all seven continents
for his emotional portrayals and superb artistry.
In the last decade alone, Mr. Finch has performed
in Germany, Spain, France, Austria, Switzerland,
Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the
United States (including Alaska and Hawaii),
Brazil, Argentina, Israel, Egypt, China, Japan,
Australia and New Zealand in the great American
masterpiece, Porgy and Bess. Known worldwide
for the roles of both Crown and Porgy, and with
upwards of a thousand performances to his credit,
combined with his consummately muscular
physique, his deeply resonant baritone makes him
one of the foremost interpreters of this opera in the
world. A student at the American Conservatory of
Music and the distinguished London School of
Voice, Mr. Finch won Opryland USA’s “Most
Outstanding Male Vocalist” two years in a row. His
versatility and passion for the theatre have been
evident from the beginning of his distinguished
career, both through the wide range of roles he has
played onstage (from the Black in Roar of the
Greasepaint to Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar to
John the Baptist in Godspell to the Lion in The
Wiz) and through the variety of his theatrical skills
and interests. His talents and career developed in
Hollywood and in greater Chicago: in Hollywood
he co-founded the Sunset Studio West and Theatre
Unlimited. For 10 years (1980-1990) he was an
actor-member, director and coach for Chicago’s
Free Street Theatre. In 1988 he was co-author,
coach and consultant for its world premiere
production of The Project, in which he also
alternated the roles of Ben Fordson and Neckbone.
Its success resulted in a revival at the Kennedy
Centre and a world tour the following year. During
these years he created the Chicago premieres of the
Boatman in Sunday in the Park with George, and
of Cool Maine in The First. These years also saw
Mr. Finch in the role of Marty in the national tour
of Dreamgirls. Mr. Finch especially revels using his
theatrical prowess creatively and for community
service. In 1990, he began work on a children’s
video on mispronounced words, having taught
speech, diction, and communication skills for six
years to inner-city children at Chicago’s CabriniGreen residency program. In 1998 he created,
directed, co-produced and starred in a film call
The Last Ritual. In recent months Mr. Finch has
enjoyed working in New Zealand on TVNZ’s What
Now and can been seen in the role of Sandor in the
blockbuster TV series Xena, Warrior Princess.
The commitment of Mr. Finch’s wide ranging
abilities to an equally wide range of human
interests resonates with the examples of Spielberg,
Eastwood, Snipes, and Spike Lee. He is a
significant emerging presence in the industry.
Larry is a native of the Eastern Shore of
Virginia. He recently returned from making his
European debut performing the role of Crown
in Porgy and Bess with New York Harlem
Productions. He has also performed with
Sarasota Opera (Apprentice Artist), Virginia
Opera (Resident Spectrum Artist), Edmonton
Opera, Bay View Music Festival (Young Artist),
Todi Music Festival, Virginia Arts Festival, and
National Philharmonic. His opera credits
include: Don Giovanni (Don Giovanni), La
Boheme (Marcello), Così fan tutte (Don
Alfonso), Die Zauberflöte (Sprecher), Faust
(Valentin), Fidelio (Don Fernando), Carmen
(Morales), La Traviata (Germont), Dido and
Aeneas (Aeneas), Gallantry (Dr. Gregg), Amahl
and the Night Visitors (Melchior), Porgy and
Bess (Robbins).
American lyric soprano Theresa Hamm-Smith
began this season singing the Bach Magnificat with
the Atlanta Symphony. She debuted last season as
the Countess in Le Nozze di Figaro with the Atlanta
Symphony followed by Bernstein's Jeremiah
Symphony under the baton of Robert Spano. Most
recently she completed a concert tour of South
Korea, sang Donna Anna in Don Giovanni with the
Chautauqua Opera, Porgy and Bess with the
Evansville Philharmonic and the Brahms' Requiem
with the Baton Rouge Symphony. Ms. HammSmith made her San Francisco Opera debut in the
world premiere of Dead Man Walking, receiving
excellent reviews for her portrayal of Sister Rose,
which she also recorded for the Erato Label.
Theresa began her Metropolitan Opera career with
Clara in Porgy and Bess, later returning for Die
Frau Ohne Schatten and Parsifal. She has toured
the globe in the Houston Grand Opera/Sherwin
Goldman production of Porgy and Bess as Serena,
later switching to the role of Bess for the Teatro
Colon in Buenos Aires, Teatro Municipal in Sao
Paolo and the Virginia Opera. The artist has also
appeared with the New Jersey State Opera in
Nabucco and made a debut with Ireland's Wexford
Festival in Zaza.
Stephanie is a native of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. She began her musical studies at
Thayer Conservatory of Atlantic Union College.
She has performed in concerts and recitals
throughout Europe, Scandinavia, and the
Caribbean. Most recently Ms. Beadle performed
the role of Serena from the Gershwins' Porgy and
Bess at the Cologne Opera, the Norske Opera and
other performances in Spain and France.
Ms. Fridal, a native of Trinidad & Tobago, studied
at St. Mary’s Hall Brighton with Leone Ratner,
and at The Royal College of Music, London
England, with Margaret Bisset Stubbs. She
received her first professional engagement at The
Glyndebourne Festival Opera in their production
of Porgy and Bess, singing in the ensemble and
covering the role of Lily. Ms. Fridal continued on
to The Royal Opera House Covent Garden, under
the baton of Sir Simon Rattle and director Trevor
Nunn. She is featured in the film of Porgy and
Bess and the EMI recording, filmed at The
Shepperton Studios in London. Ms. Fridal has
performed the roles of Santuzza and Mama Lucia
with The Opera Northeast production of
Cavalleria Rusticana and was recently in their
production of Bizet’s Carmen. Anne has also
performed at The Bregenzer Festespiele in
Bregenz, Austria with the famed Vienna Symphony
Orchestra and at the Royal Albert Hall, The
Purcell Room, the Royal Festival Hall, and The
Queen Elizabeth Hall where she has been a special
guest soloist of The London Zemell Choir.
Operatic roles include Leonore in Il Trovatore,
Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, Carmen in Carmen,
Amneris in Aida, and Ulrica in Un Ballo in
Maschera. Anne has now embarked on a career
which has taken her around the world with debuts
in Israel, Japan, The Caribbean, Australia, New
Zealand, Taiwan, England, Ireland and Wales,
Canada, and the United States. Ms. Fridal is the
first international opera singer to bridge the gap
between Opera Calypso and the Steelpan. She is the
founder of El Cariam Foklore, an American
Caribbean Folk / Classical ensemble. She
has been sponsored by the New York Daily
News to present a series of summer
concerts at major venues in the New York
metropolitan area including Centerstage at
the World Trade Center, City Hall, The
Intrepid Museum and The South Street
Seaport. Sir Edward Greenfield of the
London Telegraph quoted: “Miss
Fridal is a rich-voiced Black singer
with real feeling.”
Michelle D. Owens, soprano, has performed both
nationally and internationally. She is a recent
graduate of the Mannes College of Music in New
York City, where she graduated in May, 1998. She
was seen in Porgy and Bess at the Bregenz Festival
in Austria and has studied voice with the renowned
Rita Patane of Italy and Jerome Hines in the USA.
She has performed in and attended various
workshops and summer programs throughout
Italy. Opera repertory includes: Turandot (Title
Role), First Lady (Magic Flute) Waltraute in (Die
Walküre) and 1st Maid In Elektra (Strauss),
Gianni Schicchi, Suor Angelica, Dialogues of the
Carmelites, and Iolanta. She is now pursuing her
operatic career in Europe.
Theresa made her Carnegie Hall debut as soprano
soloist in the Verdi Requiem, which she later
reprised with the Knoxville Symphony. She was the
soprano soloist in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9
with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and San Antonio
Symphony. She has been featured in concert with
the New Jersey Symphony, St. Paul Chamber
Orchestra, the Louisiana Symphony, the Phoenix
Symphony, the Greater Boston Youth Orchestra,
the Orchester der Beethovenhalle, Bonn, and with
Keith Lockart and the Utah Symphony. She
debuted at the Salzburg Festival as a soloist with the
Grace Bumbry Black Musical Heritage Vocal
Ensemble and appeared with Ms. Bumbry's
Ensemble at Carnegie Hall, followed by a European
tour. An Off-Broadway debut came in the premiere
of Ricky Ian Gordon's opera Only Heaven, later
returning to Off-Broadway to premiere the opera
Different Fields, a children's opera commissioned
by the Metropolitan Opera Guild.
Throughout her career Theresa has collected an
impressive string of competitions, starting as a
Metropolitan Opera National Council Finalist,
going on to win The Grande Prix Lyrique in MonteCarlo, the New Jersey State Opera Auditions, the
Mobile Opera Competition and a grant from Opera
Index, Inc. She is a former member of the Houston
Opera Studio.
RONN K. SMITH
TYRONE STANLEY
SHERYL SHELL
HEATHER HILL
MARVIN LOWE
JARRETT ALI BOYD
Sportin’ Life
Sportin’ Life / Resident of Catfish Row
Maria / Resident of Catfish Row
Clara / Strawberry Women /
Resident of Catfish Row
Jake
Jake / Robbins / Resident of Catfish Row
Over the past year and a half North Carolina
audiences have seen Mr, Smith as Spoletta in Tosca
with Opera Carolina and Mingo in Porgy and Bess,
with Piedmont Opera as Sportin’ Life in Porgy
and Bess. Raleigh audiences may remember Ronn
as the sinister Monsieur D’Arque in North
Carolina Theater’s production of Beauty and the
Beast.
Mr. Smith’s career has taken him to many regional
and repertory theatres across America and
throughout Asia, Australia, New Zealand,
Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Sicily, Holland,
Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the UK, and the
Bahamas. He has performed in a broad range of
prestigious venues, some of which are The
Kennedy Center, La Jolla Playhouse, san Diego
Repertory Theater, Broadway’s Royale Theater,
Milwaukee Repertory, Brooklyn Academy of
Music, Fulton Opera Theater, New England
Operetta, Calgary Opera, Edmonton Opera, The
Pioneer Theater, Houston Grand Opera and the
San Antonio and Colorado Springs Symphonies.
He has had the privilege to work with such notable
directors and choreographers as Jack O’Brien,
George Faison, Billy Wilson, Des McAnuff, Peter
Lawrence, Albert Marre and John Tillinger. Robb
has shared the stage with many renowned
performers, among them are George C. Scott,
Charles Dunning, Robert Houlet, John Cullem
and Lea Solonga.
After acquiring a BFA in Musical Theater from
Loretto Heights College, in Denver, Colorado and
a year of study toward an MFA at San Diego State
University, Ronn embarked on a career pursuing
his passion for acting, singing and dancing. Some
of Ronn’s credits include: Inherit the Wind
(Broadway), Miss Saigon (2nd National U.S. Tour
and Manila, Philippines), Bubblin’ Brown Sugar,
Man of La Mancha, The King and I, Ragtime,
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat,
Porgy and Bess, Three Mo’ Tenors (Ensemble),
Williams and Walker, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Five Guys
Named Moe, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Die
Fledermaus, A Grand Night for Singing, Jelly
Roll: The Man and His Music and You Can’t Take
It With You.
In 2002, Ronn was awarded the Austin Critics
Table Award Best Actor in a Musical for his debut
performance as Jelly Roll Morton in the Zachary
Scott Theater production of Jelly’s Last Jam.
Tyrone hails from Goldsboro, North Carolina. A
1995 graduate NC A&T State University, his first
professional opportunity came when he landed the
role of Daniel in the Off Broadway musical Once
On This Island. Mr. Stanley later took a solo
contract with Stardust Productions of Amsterdam,
Holland in which he was a lead singer and dancer.
In addition to his vocal and theatrical
accomplishments, he is a published playwright/
composer and received rave reviews for his musical
production, Souls On Fire. Mr. Stanley sang in
numerous classical roles including Lord Arturo
Bucklaw in Lucia di Lammermoor and Septimius
in Handel’s Theodora. In addition, he has been the
tenor soloist in Harlem’s Handel’s Messiah and
The Crucifixion. Mr. Stanley has been featured as
an up and coming R&B artist in the Soul Café;
Ashford & Simpson’s Sugar Bar; and CBGB’s
Gallery. He recently completed a national tour of
the hit Fats Waller Musical Ain’t Misbehavin’ in the
role of Andre (Viper). He was also featured in an
open run of NJ Performing Arts production of
Your Arms Too Short to Box With God, which
starred Melba Moore and Cissy
Houston. He has appeared on
CBS’ As the World Turns; ABC’s
All My Children; HBO’s Sex &
the City; the Dave Chapelle
Show; and Whoopi. He
thanks God for this blessing
and dedicates this tour to his
son Marcus and the entire
Stanley family.
Sheryl is a native of Brooklyn, New York. She
holds a Master's Degree in Elementary
Education and Music from Brooklyn College
and taught in several NYC schools. She
performed in the Metropolitan Opera, the Civic
Light Opera and Radio City Music Hall
productions of Porgy and Bess and on
numerous European tours. She enjoys playing
the piano, harmonica and conga drums as well
as hair and wig styling.
Heather Hill, soprano, hails from Englewood,
Colorado. Her most recent performances
include Konstanza in Die Entführung aus dem
Serail, Bastienna in Bastien and Bastienna,
Lola in Gallantry, as well as Dionisia in the
world premiere of La Curandera, by Roberto
Rodriguez. Additional roles performed include
the title roles in Semele and in Acis and Galatea
by Handel, Barbarina in Le nozze di Figaro, La
Princesse in L'enfant et les Sortilèges and
Pamina in a touring children's version of The
Magic Flute. Heather received her Master of
Music degree in vocal performance from
Manhattan School of Music. Her performance
credits also include oratorios, concert works,
off-Broadway and regional musical theatre,
television and film, and she brought joy to
millions as lead soprano in The Voices of Liberty
at Walt Disney World, EPCOT in Florida.
Heather was a finalist at the 2006 Denver Lyric
Opera Guild competition and recipient of the
Karl Schmid Memorial Award, and a finalist
and winner of the The Micki Savin Award at the
2004 Connecticut Opera Guild Competition.
Marvin is a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He has toured extensively throughout the United
States, Canada, Europe and Australia. His
classical credits include soloist performances of
Bach’s Mass in G, Faure, Verdi, Mozart’s
Requiem, Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s
Elijah. In opera performances he has been heard
nationally and internationally in productions of
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, in Opera Ebony’s
production of Oh Freedom (Spiritual Ballet),
Harriet Tubman and the 48th concert season of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art; Opera Ebony
presents Opera and All that Jazz. He has also sung
with the New York City Opera in their new operatic
works such as La Fanciulla Del West, Of Mice and
Men, and Dead Man Walking. Mr. Lowe’s
theatrical credits include the role of Fred in the
national tour of Smokey Joe’s Café, principal
soloist in the Lagin Company’s National tour of
Riverdance, The Show. He has also played Joe
in the Livent and Stageright Australian
production tour of Showboat and the Priest and
Elder in the national tour of Vinette Carroll’s Your
Arms Too Short To Box With God. In addition to
classical and theatrical performances, Marvin’s
television and film credits include Emmy
nominated Great Performances: Live from
Lincoln Center, New York City Opera’s production
of Porgy and Bess, Channel Thirteen’s Great
performances of Aida’s Brothers and
Sisters: Black Voices in Opera (world
premiere) and the films Boomerang
produced by Eddie Murphy and
Malcom X directed by Spike Lee.
I would like to dedicate these
performances to the loving memory
of my mother and father.
Mr. Boyd is a versatile performer, equally at home
in musical theater, opera, symphonic, concert, a
published song writer and a noted studio/backup
vocalist. Mr. Boyd was a backup vocalist for
Rob Thomas of rock group MatchBox20 and
appears on his solo debut CD Something To Be on
Atlantic Records label. Mr. Boyd appeared in the
first national tour of Cats since its closing after 19
years, in which he played the role of Old
Deuteronomy to critical acclaim. Recent theatrical
credits include the 25th Anniversary national tour
of Ain't Misbehavin', directed by original cast
member Ken Page. Regional credits include roles
in Show Boat, The Wiz, and Big River. Mr. Boyd’s
New York City engagements have included Sinatra
– His Voice, His World, His Way at Radio City
Music Hall, Gregory Hines memorial at the Apollo
Theatre, Great Joy! at the New Amsterdam,
Halleluiah at Town Hall, and the Kander & Ebb
Alumni Recital starring Liza Minelli. He can also
be heard on the film soundtrack A Home at the
End of the World starring Colin Farrell. He is also
a member of the Broadway Inspirational Voices.
Mr. Boyd began his formal music training at the
Virginia Governor's School for the Arts. He
received numerous awards, including a
scholarship to study at The Juilliard Preparatory
School in NYC. Mr. Boyd received his Bachelor of
Music in Opera Performance from the
Shenandoah Conservatory.
JEANETTE BLAKENEY
MARLON DEBIQUE
EARL WELLINGTON HAZELL, JR.
KENDREW AMIR HERIVEAUX
ROBERT LYMAN HOYT, III
CLINTON INGRAM
Lily / Strawberry Women / Resident of Catfish Row
Robbins / Resident of Catfish Row
Undertaker / Resident of Catfish Row
Mingo / Resident of Catfish Row
Detective
Peter, The Honey Man / Resident of Catfish Row
Dynamic, Captivating, Intense, Regal is how critics
have described this lovely lady, Jeanette Blakeney.
The California native is well known for her
dramatic portrayals, comic timing, and strong
colorful voice. She has gained National and
International recognition that has taken her to
opera houses and concert halls around the world
with debuts at New York City Opera, Virginia
Opera, Orlando Opera, Dayton Opera, Baltimore
Opera, Nashville Opera, Utah Festival Opera,
Aspen Music Festival, York Grand Opera, Cork
Grand Opera, The New Israeli Opera Tel Aviv,
Teatro Sociale di Italia, The Dalhalla Festival in
Sweden, Teatro Comunale in Bologna and The Alte
Opera in Frankfurt, Germany. Ms. Blakeney’s
repertoire displays a wide rang of characters. She
received a rave review from Opera News for her
performance in the role of Francis Poulenc’s La
Voix Humaine, at Opera San Jose. Other featured
roles include: Suzuki in Puccini’s Madama
Butterfly, Filipyevena in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene
Onegin, Mercedes in Bizet’s Carmen, Amastre in
Handel’s Xerxes, Marcellina in Mozart’s Le Nozze
di Figaro, Flora in Verdi’s La Traviata, Marthe in
Gounod’s Faust, Berta in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di
Siviglia, Maria, Strawberry Woman, and Annie in
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Sally in Barber’s A
Hand of Bridge, and Dinah in Bernstein’s Trouble
in Tahiti.
Ms. Blakeney was delighted to return to New York
City to reprise the role of Annie and Maria (cover)
in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for a National
Telecast on PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center.
Sought after as a soloist for her rich timbre and
commanding presence, Ms. Blakeney made her
Carnegie Hall debut performing the world
premiere of the song cycle Climbing, which was
written and dedicated to her by the composer, Tom
Cipullo. Ms. Blakeney has made numerous
appearances with symphony orchestras: The New
York Philharmonic, Chesapeake Orchestra, New
Haven Symphony Orchestra, Oakland Symphony
Orchestra, San Jose Symphony Orchestra, Santa
Cruz Symphony Orchestra, and The San
Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
Critics have consistently recognized her
intelligence and versatility in both Opera and
Musical Theatre. She performed the role of
Queenie in Harold Prince’s Tony award-winning
revival of Show Boat, including a 3-month run at
the Prince Edward Theatre in London’s West End.
Other featured roles include Bloody Mary in
Rodger and Hammerstein’s South Pacific and
Isabel in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of
Penzance. Ms. Blakeney received recognition from
her home town when she was inducted into the
Hanford, California, Hall of Fame for her
Professional Achievements.
A native of Trinidad and Tobago in the West
Indies, Mr. De Bique's early roles were in Blossom
Time, Treasure Island and My Fair Lady. In 2003
he won the Havelock Nelson Cup for Best Operatic
Performance in the Trinidad and Tobago Music
Festival. At present he is a member and soloist with
Trinidad’s Marionettes Chorale and performed
with the choir in Costa Rica in August of 2004 at
the Voces del Mundo Festival. He has also
performed the roles of the Sorceror and Sailor in
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with the Key Academy
of Music, Judas in the Baggass Company’s staging
of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar
in February of 2005 and Thami Mbikwana in Athol
Fugard’s earthy play My Children, My Africa with
Relevant Theatre Productions. With Living Arts
International, he has played Robbins in Porgy and
Bess on their Trinidad tour in March of 2005 and
their Fall tour in the UK of the same year where in
addition to Robbins he played Sportin’ Life and
Crabman. Recent appearances have been in the
Trinidad and Tobago Music Festival, a solo recital
at Christ Church Cascade in Trinidad and guest
performer at the Argentine Embassy’s consulate at
their National Day celebrations. Mr. De Bique
is known for his warm voice and stylish
performances and is a dedicated artist who
believes in discipline and passion in developing
the true artist.
Native New Yorker and renaissance man Earl
Wellington Hazell is a bass-baritone singer, actor,
composer/arranger and author of the forthcoming
book of poetry They Is Our Women Now, a
celebration of the iconic women of the Gershwins’
Porgy and Bess. A student of jazz composition of
legends Jimmy Heath and Donald Byrd; acting
student of Hal de Windt, founder of the American
Theatre of Harlem; and voice student of Dr. Robert
White, Benjamin Matthews & Wayne Sanders of
Opera Ebony in New York and Dr. Everett
McCorvey, Earl has performed for and with many
of the great artists of our time; from James Levine
of the Metropolitan Opera and the New York
Philharmonic; to Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln;
to Jessye Norman; to Elton John. As a character
bass-baritone, along with Colline of La Boheme,
Sparafucile of Rigoletto, Joe of Jerome Kern’s
Showboat, Booker T. Washington of Ragtime and
several others, Earl continues to perform the roles
of Jake, Jim, Robbins, Lawyer Frazier and the
Undertaker of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess as he
has throughout the continental United States,
Hawaii, Canada and Europe, including the Central
Cultural de Belem in Lisbon, the Royal Albert Hall
in London and the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome.
These performances mark his singing debut in
Australia and New Zealand.
Kendrew is originally from Miami, Florida
where he has appeared in the plays and
musicals A Woman Called Truth, and The Good
Women of Setzuan, and Once Upon A Mattress.
He also performed with the Jubilate Vocal
Ensemble where he had the opportunity to
perform in the Porgy and Bess Suite and with
the Riunitti Opera Company where he
performed L'Amour a Trois (The Telephone).
Recently he has appeared in the experimental
musical Cellphones, in New York and in
Katonga at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay. This is
his first appearance in the production of Porgy
and Bess with Living Arts.
Mr. Hoyt’s musical theatre background includes
various roles in Sweeney Todd, Sweet Charity,
A Little Night Music, Lend Me a Tenor, Student
Prince, Naughty Marietta, Evita and Side By
Side by Sondheim, which he performed
throughout the country. He currently resides in
New York with his wife and his menacing cats.
Clinton has been a very active tenor soloist over the
years. He has performed every tenor role in
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess dating back to 1989
when he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in the
role of Mingo. Subsequently he was heard in the
role of Robbins with the Pittsburgh Civic Light
Opera, Sportin’ Life with Florida Arts
Celebration, Crabman with Teatro Real in
Madrid, Spain, and most recently, in more than
one hundred performances of Peter the Honey
Man with the Bregenz Festspiele and New York
Harlem Theatre Productions in Austria, Germany,
Holland, Sweden, Italy and Japan. This versatile
tenor has been a featured principal and soloist in
over forty different oratorios and cantatas; he has
been a frequent church recitalist; and, has most
recently performed jazz and love songs in supper
clubs in New York City. He has appeared in the
premieres of X by Anthony Davis and Angel Levine
by Elie Seigmeister, and has recorded Seigmeister’s
City Songs on the Gasparolabel as well as the role
of Don Arias on Columbia Records’ Le Cid. He is
a graduate of Fisk and Yale Universities.
MARY JOHNSON
CARMEN KEELS
LYDIA LEDGERWOOD
ANGELA OWENS
MARLIN MONROE WILLIFORD
Strawberry Women / Resident of Catfish Row
Annie / Strawberry Women /
Resident of Catfish Row
Lily / Resident of Catfish Row
Strawberry Women / Resident of Catfish Row
Crabman / Resident of Catfish Row
Mary is a Soprano, who has studied with the late
Lola Wilson Hayes in NYC, holds both a Bachelor
of Music and Master of Education degrees with a
concentration in Performance from Virginia. State
University. In the summers of 1997 & '98, Ms.
Johnson appeared in the productions of Porgy and
Bess at the Bregenz Festival (Austria) under the
baton of Andrew Litton and the Vienna Symphony
Orchestra. Since then she has performed with The
New York Harlem's Theatre production of Porgy
and Bess at the Teatro La Fenice (Venice); Teatro
dell'Opera di Roma (Rome) and Den Norske Opera
(Oslo). With Living Arts, she has appeared at the
Royal Festival Hall (London); at the Cairo Opera
House (Egypt) and has toured extensively in the
United States. She made her debut as Strawberry
Woman with Living Arts, in 2001 in Charleston,
S.C. with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra and
her debut as Clara in Mexico City in 2002. Ms.
Johnson made her NYC recital debut at Weill
Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall in 1993 to critical
acclaim and continues to perform in solo recitals.
She has sung the roles of Susanna (The Marriage
of Figaro) with the Amato Opera Company;
Violetta (La Traviata) with the Richmond
Civic Opera Association; and Pamina
(The Magic Flute), concert version,
with the Petersburg Symphony
Orchestra (Va.) and other leading
roles with the VSU Opera
Workshop.
She
presently
coaches with Warren George
Wilson.
Carmen is thrilled to be on tour with Porgy and
Bess, having just made her Broadway debut in the
new musical In My Life as an ensemble member
and understudy for Liz and Samantha. She has
been seen regionally in Ragtime (Sarah,) A Chorus
Line (Diana Morales,) The Cradle Will Rock (The
Moll,) World Goes Round (Woman One), and the
incomparable Mayzie La Bird in Suessical. She
would like to thank her amazing family and her
wonderful friends for all their love and support.
Lydia is a teacher, performer and entrepreneur.
She is the Director of Necessary Arts School which
she co- founded.
She has been a teacher in the Government service
for the past seventeen years. She attended the
Valsayn Teachers’ College where she graduated in
1994 as ‘Teacher of the Year’. She considers
herself a lifelong learner and so continued her
formal education at the University of the West
Indies while employed at St. Martin’s R.C.
She continued her studies in Education, her
chosen career, and again achieved Excellence as
she graduated with a Distinction in a Certificate
in Education – Teaching of Social Studies
programme. On the advice of her then lecturers
she shifted her focus somewhat and pursued
studies in Musical Arts, her Elective at Teachers’
College.
She was adjudged the Best Certificate Student in
the year 1997-1998 and on completing her
Undergraduate studies Ms. Ledgerwood was
awarded First Class Honors in BA Musical Arts.
Today Ms Ledgerwood is assigned to St Francois
Girls’ College and is presently reading for her M.
Phil. Cultural Studies.
As a performer Lydia has had several experiences,
the most recent of them being Geraldine Connor’s
Carnival Messiah and Living Arts International’s
Porgy and Bess – Trinidad as part of the local cast.
This experience was quite fulfilling for her and she
looks forward to being part of this tour of
Australia/New Zealand.
Lyric soprano Angela Owens made her operatic
debut in the roles of the Sand Man and Dew Fairy in
Hansel and Gretel with South Georgia Opera. This
success was soon followed by a regional tour of the
musical revue Tintypes, in which she sang the role of
Susannah, garnering high praise for her
interpretation of the role. Since then, career
highlights include Despina in Cosí fan tutte, Blanche
in The Dialogues of the Carmelites, Najade in
Ariadne auf Naxos, Ninetta in La Perichole and
Miss Silverpeal in The Impresario. Miss Owens has
also performed the role of Clara in Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess in over twenty opera houses and
concert halls throughout the U.S., New Zealand,
Egypt, Ireland, Wales and England. Last season,
she performed the role of Annie in Porgy and Bess
with Atlanta Opera, conducted by Stefan Lano.
An ardent lover of musical theatre and convincing in
cross-over repertoire, audiences have enjoyed Miss
Owens’ performances of Hattie in Kiss Me Kate
with the Mac-Haydn Theatre, Belladova in
Phantom with the Casa Mañana Theatre and
Josephine Baker in the world premiere of
Dodsworth with Hal Linden.
On the concert stage, Miss Owens has appeared
as the soprano soloist for Handel's Messiah,
Schubert's Mass in G, Vivaldi's Gloria,
Schubert's Stabat Mater, John Rutter's
Requiem, Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and
Mozart’s Coronation Mass.
Film and television credits include remakes of
The Manchurian Candidate with Denzel
Washington, and The Stepford Wives, with
Nicole Kidman and Glenn Close, and a national
commercial for Michelob Light.
Marlin is a native of Detroit, Michigan. Marlin has
performed with the Michigan Opera, the Aspen
Opera, New Jersey Verismo, Dicapo Opera, New
Orleans Opera, Opera Theatre of Lucca, (Lucca,
Italy) and many other smaller companies in the
states. Marlin has toured through Europe singing
with different Opera companies and groups there.
Roles and scenes in which he has performed: A
Little Night Music (Sondheim), La Traviata
(Verdi), Il Trovatore (Verdi), Street Scene (Weil),
Falstaff (Verdi), Porgy and Bess (Gershwin), Il
Tabarro (Puccini), Ariadne auf Naxos (Strauss),
Carmen (Bizet), Rondine (Puccini), La Bohème
(Puccini), Butterfly (Puccini), Rigoletto (Verdi),
and Mahagonny (Weil).
He has worked with conductors such as Julius
Rudel, James Conlon, John DeMain, David
Zinmen, and Robert Loyd. Mr Williford has
sung on the Master Classes of: Shirley Verrett,
Richard Miller, James Conlon, Banita Vollinte,
Susan Menzter, George Shirley, Vincent Cole,
Marlena Malas, and the Metropolitan Opera
Young Artist Program. Marlin made his
National Public Radio (NPR) debut with Porgy
and Bess as Daddy Peter, for 22 performances
under the baton of John DeMain. He was also part
of a 3 month tour through Europe with William
Barkhymer’s European tour of Porgy and Bess.
Speculations on Life after ‘Porgy’
by Vincent Plush
In its inaugural production by the Theater Guild of New York, Porgy and Bess
opened on 10th October 1935 and ran for 124 performances. It was only a
lukewarm success; critics were ambivalent about its “genuineness as a true
opera”, and the production lost about $70,000 for its investors, including the
brothers Gershwin and their Charleston-based writer-collaborators, DuBose
and Dorothy Heyward.
To recoup some of their investment, the Theatre Guild sent Porgy on a five-city
tour, beginning in Philadelphia on 27th January 1936. By this stage, George
and Ira Gershwin were being teased towards Hollywood, with offers to write
film musicals for the silver screen. By early August, they were ensconced in a
suite at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel, before moving to a spacious hacienda,
complete with the requisite pool and tennis court. But there was work to be
done – music for the three screen musicals, beginning with Shall We Dance,
starring Fred and Adele Astaire.
Over the Christmas holidays that year, the Gershwins hosted something of a
family reunion. George confided to his mother Rose that he and Ira had come
to Hollywood to make the money that would enable them to do whatever they
wanted in the future. As for his music, George hadn’t “even scratched the
surface yet”.
Gershwin felt keenly the gibes from composers of “serious music”, particularly
those associated with Aaron Copland and his influential circle. They had
Gershwin plugged as an untutored, self-taught lightweight, a facile purveyor of
Broadway show-tunes. The fact that he was also incredibly wealthy and a
frequent subject of social page gossip must also have caused resentment, even
jealousy. How could George present himself to these composers and to the world
at large as one of them, a “serious” composer of art music, and a genuine
“American voice”?
According to this equation, a “serious composer” wrote for orchestras (most of
which were conducted by European maestri), chamber ensembles and singers
or instrumentalists who would perform in respectable venues like Carnegie Hall
and at Columbia University. Yes, their music might contain jazz, cowboy tunes
or Southern hymnody to give it that dash of true American “flavor”, but it
could not surrender to those influences unreservedly.
At the top of that august ladder would be those who created the most serious,
admirable, daunting and European form of all: opera. Ergo, George Gershwin
would write operas. He had already tested the waters with Porgy and Bess, a
work he was careful to describe as “an American folk opera”. There would be
more, of that he was certain.
In January 1937, from his comfortable niche in West Hollywood, Gershwin
wrote to the Heywards in Charleston, South Carolina. “Now that Porgy is
behind us,” he mused, “I would like to try writing another opera, something
even more political than Porgy, if possible.” (The italics are mine; the fact that
he characterized Porgy as ‘political’ is revealing, as we shall see.)
The Heywards had just the subject and set to work on a new libretto without
delay. Once more, it would be based in and on Charleston, but with a new twist:
it would flow from a moment in Charleston’s past that the city would have
preferred remain buried.
In the summer of 1822, Charleston was shaken from its sleepy-town
complacency by a slave revolt that had been fomenting in the wake of successful
slave rebellions in the West Indies. A charismatic former slave and minister, one
Denmark Vesey (c.1767-1822) intended “to light the fire that would destroy the
stench of slavery from the South for all time”. Surrounding himself with a dozen
disciples (perhaps an intentional number?), Vesey devised a plan so intricate
and so cleverly contrived that it is studied today in classes on urban terrorism
at the West Point Military Academy and the like.
One weekend in June 1822, about 8,000 slaves were smuggled into Charleston,
“the Holy City” nestled on the narrow peninsula between the Ashley and
Cooper Rivers. When they heard the bells of St Michael’s Church – the very
bells that are heard in Porgy – they would emerge from their hiding places and
slaughter every member of the white citizenry, some 15,000 souls in all.
Less than an hour before that fateful time, one of the ringleaders, unable to
persuade his “white family” to leave town that evening, broke down and
revealed the plan. The ringleaders were arrested, the revolt collapsed in tatters.
35 of them were executed, their bodies left to hang from the scaffold for several
days around the July 4 holiday. Among these was Denmark Vesey himself, who
over three days of eloquent testimony had conducted his own defence.
The Heywards received that letter from Gershwin in late January 1937 (it
turned up amongst a pile of newspapers in the shed of their summer property
“Follywood” on Folly Island, about 20 kilometres out of Charleston). George
Gershwin died of a brain aneurism in Los Angeles on 11th July 1937, two
months short of his 39th birthday. In the six months between the arrival of
Gershwin’s letter and his death, there is no evidence of further communication
between the Gershwins and the Heywards. It is highly unlikely that Gershwin
knew of the Heywards’ subject matter, less likely his sighting any of the libretto.
Most certainly, he did not set any of it to music. At the time of his death, he was
reportedly composing a string quartet.
Gershwin’s death shook the Heywards but they continued work on their
project. Three years later, at the age of 54, DuBose Heyward himself died after
a massive heart attack in Tryon, North Carolina, on 16th June 1940. Obviously
unaware of the Paul Bowles opera about Denmark Vesey (since lost), Dorothy
Heyward, herself a successful playwright, attempted to find another composer
to set their libretto. It was rumoured that she had approached Ned Rorem, but
he took great pleasure in telling me that he was far too young (born in 1923, he
would have been barely 20 at the time) to be considered for such a task.
Instead, Dorothy took it upon herself to revise the work for the stage. So it was
that her play Set My People Free was premiered on 3rd November 1948. This
production, mounted by the ever-faithful Theater Guild of New York, ran for a
mere 29 performances. Among the cast members were the eminent singer
William Warfield (1920-2002) and Earl Jones, father of the famous
contemporary actor James Earl Jones.
In 1994, with the assistance of the Heyward estate, I obtained the director’s
copy of the script. It was not hard to understand why it had not been revived
for almost 50 years. A huge, sprawling Brechtian drama, again with an all-black
cast, it wore its heart a little too tightly on its sleeve and the original director, no
less a personage than Martin Ritt (1914-1990) had cut it mercilessly.
Could Gershwin have ever set such a libretto?
In its original form, most certainly not. But this was a text in very raw form. For
“Porgy”, George had drafted his brother Ira, one of the wittiest wordsmiths of
the age, to transform the bare bones of the Heywards’ original text. This they
had crafted in the Creole-derived “Gullah” dialect of the blacks of South
Carolina’s coastal Lowcountry.. Moreover, Porgy had had the benefit of preBroadway try-outs in Boston, where nearly a quarter of the score had been cut,
for the purposes of fitting the mould of “the Broadway musical”. Between any
text from the Heywards and an eventual staging as a Broadway musical show,
much less opera, there would have been many changes and heartbreaks.
If Gershwin had even addressed such incendiary subject matter, even after the
original text had been transformed by Ira (and would Ira’s wit have been
appropriate here?), what would this have meant for the future of homegrown
American opera?
Twenty years after Gershwin’s death, Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story
opened in New York, on 27th September 1957. Unlike Porgy some 22 years
earlier, it was an instantaneous success, running for 732 performances. Some
notable Broadway offerings from Rodgers and Hammerstein aside, to that
point in time there is no single piece of American musical theatre that has had
the social impact of West Side Story. Now, if Gershwin had produced a version
of the Denmark Vesey story in, say, 1940, what turns might the development of
American opera have taken?
Arguably, by treating such a weighty and lofty subject, Gershwin’s stocks as
a composer of “serious opera” would have risen. (Apparently, Gershwin
took his marked-up score of Berg’s Wozzeck to the American
premiere at the Philadelphia Grand Opera House in March
1931 and it is this fascinating connection between the
archetype outcasts, one a crippled American black,
the other a deranged demi-visionary
reject from the military, that has
been intriguing recent scholars and composers like Elliott Schwartz.) Such
“serious” enterprises from Gershwin may have moved Broadway closer to the
Lincoln Center, and vice versa.
Most of all, Gershwin would have helped lift the colour bar that prevented black
American singers from performing in the major American opera houses. As it
was, Marian Anderson would become the first black American singer to appear
at the Met, in a production of Verdi’s Un Ballo In Maschera in January 1955,
some 20 years after Porgy. Perhaps, with further all-black operas by George
Gershwin, that twenty-year gap could have been telescoped by a considerable
degree.
Beyond music, if America’s most popular composer had continued to create
operas that dealt with issues of the racial divide, the divide itself may have
contracted. In 1956, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parkes was arrested for
refusing to yield her bus seat to a white man and the 27-year-old Dr Martin
Luther King Jr was giving his first sermons in the Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church. Arguably, at 58, George Gershwin would have been at the height of his
creative powers and public acclaim. He may have had several operas under his
belt by then. In all likelihood, they would have been on “black subject matters”
possibly “more political” than Porgy itself. It is possible that Gershwin may
have had a critical influence on the evolution of the Civil Rights movement
itself, mirroring, indeed, the influence of Giuseppe Verdi on Italian politics in
the late 19th century.
All highly speculative, of course, but it’s fascinating to postulate Porgy and Bess
as not only a window on the future of a composer but also as a decisive
development in American history.
PETER KLEIN
Producer
Peter Klein, president of Living Arts Inc., has been
dedicated to bringing new and unique productions
as well as timeless classics to audiences across the
globe. He brought the American Ballet Theatre
with Baryshnikov and Kirkland to Italy for their
first tour. He arranged tours of Israel, Europe and
the Far East for the Pearl Lang Company, the Feld
Ballet, Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, San
Francisco Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance
Theatre, the Dance Theater of Harlem, Sydney
Dance Company, and Boston Ballet and more. He
sent the National Ballet of Canada, La Scala
Ballet, and Les Ballets de Monte Carlo on
European and American tours. He sent Pilobus,
Twyla Tharp and Mummenschanz to Israel. He
brought the Broadway production of West Side
Story to Europe, where it was the first original
Broadway production of this American classic in
Italy and France, followed by the first European
tour of A Chorus Line which toured throughout
Europe for four seasons.
In recent years, in addition to Porgy and Bess,
Living Arts Inc. has toured Opera Nazionale
Italiana in the US, the Harlem Gospel Ensemble in
Portugal and Italy, toured the Joffrey Ballett, and
sent a production of Broadway Tonight to Japan,
Hong Kong, and Switzerland. The Living Arts
production of Porgy and Bess is now touring in its
13th year, having performed more than 900
performances in over 400 cities on all 6 continents.
JENNIFER MCLOUGHLIN-HOYT
Associate Producer / Company Manager
Ms. McLoughlin-Hoyt has
turned to production after many
years as a professional opera
singer. Since beginning this new
aspect of her professional life
three years ago she has
successfully organized tours of
Porgy and Bess in the US, UK, Canada, Trinidad
and Portugal. In addition to Porgy and Bess she
has organized and assisted in the production of US
tours for the Polish Philharmonic Resovia (2002
and 2004), the Israel Contemporary Dance
Theater and the Arad Symphony Orchestra or
Romania. Currently Jennifer is working on some
producing projects for tours in the United States as
well as beginning her own management company
specializing in singers while continuing her
dedication and support to the continued success of
Porgy and Bess. Ms. Hoyt still maintains an active
singing career and will be performing in concert
with her husband, tenor, Robert Hoyt, with the
Arad Symphony Orchestra in Romania this fall.
STEFAN KOZINSKI
Conductor
Stefan has been Music Director
of
Living
Arts' touring
production of Porgy and Bess
since 1997 and Solorepetiteur of
the Anhaltischen Theater
Dessau since 2001. In 2004 he
became the pianist and arranger
for a classic-jazz trio which
features its founder, hornist and jazz artist Nicolae
Apostol as well as contralto Daniela-Stefanie
Kappel. The trio made its Romanian debut in Sibiu
with two concerts at the end of June 2006, one of
them with the Sibiu Philharmonic under Stefan's
direction.
From 1985 to 1995 Stefan was the Associate
Conductor of the Spokane Symphony Orchestra
(USA) and from 1987 to 1992 Music Director of
Spokane's Northwest Bach Festival. During these
years he created 14 SymFunnies Concerts for
Kids, mostly for Spokane; he also conducted
them in many other American cities as well as in
Calgary (Canada) and in Aachen (Germany),
performed to rave reviews and often breaking
box-office records. Among his 85+ compositions
and arrangements are 13 orchestrations of CivilWar spirituals, premiered with the RadioPhilharmonie Hannover, and 12 orchestrations
of compositions by popular Iranian composer
Anoushirvan Rohani, recorded on a CD entitled
Symphonic Love Melodies for the London Label
Sound Solutions and performed in the first
concert of Hannover's Neurobionic Foundation.
His credo: Subjective and spontaneous, from
the heart and ear: only then do we have music,
the blessing of humankind.
ZOLTAN PAPP
Assistant Conductor
Zoltan Papp, began his musical studies at the age
of five studying piano, violoncello and
compositions at the high school of music in Pècs,
Hungary. He went on to further study
composition at the Budapest Music Academy as a
student of Ferenc Farkas. Zoltan Papp’s musical
and theatre compositions have been performed in
almost every Hungarian city hall and theatre, as
well as on televisions and radio. His compositions
have also been premiered in the United States,
the United Kingdom and throughout Europe. His
teaching engagements include the Academy for
Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest, where he
taught from 1971 to 1977. He has been the
conductor of the Pècs National Theatre since
1977 and has conducted over 30 operettas, 25
musicals and 3 operas. Since 1999 he has
conducted Porgy and Bess in the US, Canada,
Egypt, Israel, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, The
UK, Ireland and Portugal.
SUSAN WILLIAMS-FINCH
Stage Director/Costume Designer
It is with great privilege and delight that Susan
debuts her position of Stage Director to the
audiences of Australasia. With six hundred
performances, over five continents in eight years,
she is no stranger to this great American
masterpiece.
Her love and respect of the outstanding cast of
performers who weave their craft in portrayal of
this unique opera is undying. The foundation of
a dedicated and stellar crew, and the brilliance of
maestro Stefan Kozinski and his orchestra, gives
this international production the passion, soul,
strength and survival of “Cat Fish Row”.
Susan resides in Philadelphia PA USA and shares
a busy schedule between Porgy and Bess Living
Arts, six years with the prestigious Spoleto
Festival USA, working with cutting edge
international designers and directors, two years
at grass roots level with Bard NY “Summer Scape
Festival”.
An artist in her own right, she takes retreat in her
native country ‘Aotearoa’ New Zealand where in
solitaire she resides in her studio and visually
portrays her endless global journeys and joy of
mankind through her art. She has exhibited and
had installations in New Zealand, Australia,
Netherlands and the USA.
JAMES FOUCHARD
Scenic Designer
James has created the sets for over 150
productions in regional, stock, opera, and
educational theatre. Previous design credits
include the National Tours of Can-Can
(starring Chita Rivera and the Radio City Music
Hall Rockettes), The Show-Off (starring Jean
Stapleton), the Charleston Production of Porgy
and Bess, Little Shop Of Horrors, Singin' In
The Rain, Dear Mr. Ziegfeld, and The Sound
Of Music, as well as productions for Syracuse
Stage, Ford's Theater, and Cape Cod's
Monomoy Theater. During the summers he
serves as resident designer at Pennsylvania's
acclaimed Totem Pole Playhouse. Mr.
Fouchard's designs have also been featured in
gallery exhibitions at Georgetown University
and the Smithsonian Institution.
KEILA CORDOVA
Choreographer
Keila Cordova grew up writing stories and
watching her mother dance in Panama before
migrating to California, where she began
creating movement work. Always fascinated by
the juncture between verbal and physical
language as well as ideas of “authentic”
movement, cathartic art, humanity in
performance, and dance as a venue for
transformation and kinetic communication, she
began KCD in 2000 with a mix of dancers,
writers and musicians coming together to
explore the inheritance of movement in
collaborative workshops for the Mamibaile
project. Her work has been performed at Aaron
Davis Hall, Dixon Place, BAAD! (Bronx
Academy of Art & Dance), D.U.M.B.O. Arts
Festival, Around the Coyote Festival (Chicago),
Toronto Dance Fringe (fFIDA), Philadelphia
Fringe Festival, the NY Solar One Arts Festival,
‘Spanic Attack, Clement Soto Velez Center, the
HERE Arts Center and Mulberry Street
Theater. She has created theatrical
choreography for Johnny 23 (The Producer’s
Club II), Looking Up (The Edinburgh Fringe
Festival), The Bacchae (NY Fringe, American
Living Room Festival), and Dominica’s Smile
(Grove Theater) and has received artistic
support with Funds for New Work awards from
Aaron Davis Hall; artist residency awards from
the Constance B. Saltonstall Foundation, The
Millay Colony, Norcroft, as well as an Audre
Lorde Fellowship.
KATHRYN M. SCARPINO
Lighting Designer / Lighting Supervisor
This is Kathryn's 6th tour with Porgy and Bess
and she is delighted to return in such an exciting
artistic position, surrounded by a passionate
creative team as well as a highly skilled acting
and technical staff.
Kathryn attended Plymouth State College in the
White Mountains of New Hampshire, USA
where she studied technical theatre with an
option in lighting design and technology. Upon
leaving university, she moved to Boston,
Massachusetts where she worked two years
nationally as a project manager for a corporate
events lighting firm where she worked with such
clients as: Aerosmith, The Violent Femmes,
Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Zombie, the New England
Patriots, the Boston Red Sox, the NFL Draft,
Microsoft, IBM, and Rite Aid Corporation.
Upon leaving Boston, she moved to New Orleans
where she worked for herself as a freelance
corporate lighting consultant for two years.
Kathryn has been working now with Living Arts
and Peter Klein for three years, as a lighting
department assistant, a Lighting Department
Supervisor, and additionally as a Lighting
Designer; the last show she designed for him was
a piece in Warsaw, Poland in 2004.
CANDACE DONNELLY
Costume Designer
Candace previously designed the Virginia Opera's
production of Porgy and Bess. On Broadway, she
designed the costumes for Our Country's Good,
Fences and Mastergate. She designed Rebel
Armies Deep Into Chad for Long Wharf, Major
Barbara and Man and Superman for Berkeley
Repertory, The Extra Man at South Coast
Repertory Theatre, Power Failure at American
Repertory Theatre, and Tales Of Hoffman for the
Hong Kong Opera. Ms. Donnelly has designed
productions for Second Stage, Center Stage, Yale
Repertory Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club,
Seattle Repertory, Playwrights Horizons and
many others.
RAJIV SHAH
Production Manager
Rajiv is a native of Philadelphia, PA who has
had a love of theatre since his adolescence. He
has worked at many prestigious festivals
including Summer Stage, Spoleto USA, and
Lincoln Center Out of Doors to name a few. He
is a crafted carpenter, but also works as a scenic
designer, stage manager, and technical director.
He graduated from Temple University with a
BA in theatre. He has been the production
manager for the International tour of Porgy
and Bess since 2003. Since then he has
travelled throughout the United States, in
Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom,
Portugal, and Trinidad with the company.
ORCHESTRA
FRENCH HORN
CELLO
VIOLINS
Krisztian Bodor
Krisztina Réka Kührner
Tihamér Nagy
Andrea Kanya Nagyne
VIOLA
TRUMPET
Istvánné Farkas
Robert Matyas
BASSOON
Zsuzsanna Ocskai
AD
CLARINET/SAXOPHONE
TROMBONE
Péter Hotzi
Imre Lajos Nagy
TRUMPET
Tamás Racz
OBOE/ENGLISH HORN
László Nagy
SYDNEY
MELBOURNE
ADELAIDE
BRISBANE
VIOLIN 1
Michelle Kelly
Veronique Serret
Narine Melconian
VIOLIN 1
Andrea Keeble
Aaron Barnden
Billy Jean Clancy
VIOLIN I
Rob John
Anne Horton
Melanie Radke
VIOLIN
Stephen Tooke
Christa Powell
Jenny Khafagi
VIOLIN 2
Michele Jackson
Dominique Gallery
VIOLIN 2
Suzanne Simpson
Sarah Depasquale
VIOLIN 2
(Katherine) Frances Davies
Emma Perkins
Katie Sillar
Nicole McMahon
VIOLA
Rudi Crivici
Valmai Coggins
Heather Lloyd
VIOLA
Lauren Segal
Su-ying Aw
Beth Hemming
VIOLA
Imants Larsens
Asher Stephenson
Joanna Tobin
CELLO
Clare Brassil
Jane Williams
CELLO
Bill Howard
Caerwen Martin
CELLO
Rachel Johnston
Gemma Phillips
DOUBLE BASS
Dave Ellis
BASS
Stuart Riley
DOUBLE BASS
Harley Gray
FLUTE/PICCOLO
Lamorna Knightingale
FLUTE
Claire Nicholson
FLUTE/ PICOLO
Rebecca Johnson
CLARINET / BASS CLARINET
Sue Newsome
CLARINET / BASS CLARINET
Lisa Jennings
CLARINET / BASS CLARINET
Louise Skelton
CLARINET / TENOR SAX
Craig Driscoll
CLARINET / TENOR SAX
Marty Corcoran
CLARINET / TENOR SAX
Damien Hurn
HORN 2 IN F
Genevieve Campbell
HORN 2
Kate Peart
HORN
Lauren Manuel
TROMBONE
Nigel Crocker
TENOR TROMBONE
Charles McInnes
TROMBONE
Andrew Ey
VIOLA
Anna Jack
Leah Zweck
Karen Gordon
CELLO
Christine Wang
David Dornbucsh
DOUBLE BASS
Marian Heckenberg
FLUTE/PICCOLO
Roxy Kavanagh
CLARINET / BASS CLARINET
Neil McGregor
CLARINET / SAX
Karen Cockeron
HORN IN F
Susan Jackson
TROMBONE
Mark Ham
Venue Credits
to come
Venue Credits
to come
LIVING ARTS INC
PETER KLEIN, President
JENNIFER MCLOUGHLIN-HOYT, Associate Producer/Company Manger
SUSAN WILLIAMS-FINCH, Stage Director
RAJIV SHAH, Production Manager
DENIZ AKYUREK, Sound Engineer
KATHRYN SCARPINO, Lighting Designer/Lighting Supervisor
ETHAN MIMM, Head Carpenter
KIMBERLY THURSTON, Wardrobe Supervisor
ANGELA FAYERWEATHER, Assistant Stage Manger/Props
SARAH EDMUNDS, Front of House Electrician
ROBERT HOYT, Assistant Company Manager
CHRISTOPHER RANSOM, Carpenter
ANDREW MCKINNON, Tour Direction
? Advertising and Publicity
SCENERY BUILT BY CENTERLINE STUDIOS, INC.,
CORNWALL, NEW YORK
COSTUMES ORIGINALLY DESIGNED
FOR VIRGINIA OPERA ASSOCIATION
FOR ITS 1992 PRODUCTION