The tenth anniversary season of The Princeton Festival comes to a close this coming weekend with the Keystone State Boychoir and the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess.
Marianne Grey, a docent at the Princeton University Art Museum, is set to address “Illustrating Life in the American South before Porgy and Bess” with selected visuals of artists’ representations of Negro life from colonial times to the 1920’s 7 p.m. June 26 at Lawrence Library, 2751 Brunswick Pike, Lawrenceville.
Keystone State Boychoir is scheduled to perform 7:30 p.m. June 28 at Trinity Church, 33 Mercer St., Princeton. The Boychoir is set to sing an Americana program under the direction of Steven M. Fisher.
The Boychoir has sung with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Singers; it it can also claim performances on all seven continents.
Two performances remain for the festival’s production of Porgy and Bess. Final performances are scheduled for 8 p.m. June 27 and 3 p.m. June 29 at McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton.
The opening performance on June 22 was sold out and ended with cheers and tears. The stage setting of Porgy’s Catfish Row is filled with humanity and its joys and sorrows, and with the music of a Gershwin score that contains some of the most familiar songs on earth, such as “Summertime”, “I Got Plenty of Nothin” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
The crippled beggar Porgy is played by Richard Todd Payne, the beautiful but lost Bess by Janinah Burnett. Michael Redding is Crown, Robert Mack is Sportin’ Life. Richard Tang Yuk, artistic director of The Princeton Festival, conducts, and the performance is directed by Steven LaCosse, who has directed every Festival opera since 2007. There are also children’s voices in Porgy. Twelve members of the Trenton Children’s Chorus sing as the young residents of Catfish Row.
More information is online at princetonfestival.org.
Richard Todd Payne as Porgy and Janinah Burnett as Bess sing “Bess, you is my woman now.”,
