Once Upon A Time The Funny Valentines, behind the Red Barn in Hunter. Left to right: Julia Mendelsohn, Mark Singer, Darcy Dunn
By Joan Oldknow
O
nce Upon a Time, there were two people, Mark Singer and Darcy Dunn, who coincidentally studied with the same voice teacher in Manhattan. They met and fell in love, and came, one weekend, to the Mountain Top to stay with their friend, Bill Krakauer. They fell in love again, this time with the Mountain Top. Mark and Darcy longed to be a part of building a theater there. Bill told Mark and Darcy about Peter and Sarah Finn, who had grand plans for an arts organization in Hunter, NY. Mark and Peter met, and a few months later, Mark and Darcy, with their musical director, Julia Mendelsohn, created and performed the very first concert by the Catskill Mountain Foundation, at the very first CMF performance space, the Red Barn. This was in November, 1998—one month before the Catskill Mountain Foundation was officially incorporated. The intersection of Mark and Darcy’s musical journeys with the development of Catskill Mountain Foundation is undeniable. It is only fitting that Mark and Darcy and Julia should mark their 25th anniversary with the CMF, and the CMF’s 25 anniversary year, this November 11, in a retrospective at the Doctorow Center for the Arts, one of the performance spaces envisioned by Peter Finn, oh so many years ago. The story of Mark and Darcy began back in 1987, about 12 years before the Catskill Mountain Foundation was born. Before 56 • issuu.com/catskillmtnregionguide
they met, Darcy sang in college. Through a college friend, singer Peter Castaldi, she met her voice teacher, Ray Evans Harrell (who will play a big part in this tale). She began to study voice and theater and art with him. Ray is her teacher (and Peter her friend), to this day. Mark did not begin his formal musical training until he was in his twenties, but he comes from a very musical family. His father was a cantor in a large conservative congregation in New Jersey that had a choir during the high holidays. With his parents, he and his siblings would sing harmony around the dinner table, taking the different choir parts. His aunt was an accomplished opera singer. His uncle, another cantor. Mark’s father took weekly voice lessons with a voice teacher in New York—Ray Evans Harrell. Cantor Singer’s lesson time followed the lesson of a highly respected therapist, also part of a musical family, who just happened to have a long family history on the Mountain Top, and a home on Bloomer Road in Tannersville, NY. That was Bill Krakauer. Right after college, Mark got his first job on Wall Street and, naturally, started voice lessons with Ray. It was there that he met a very nice fellow student named Darcy. In 1989, Mark and Darcy performed together in Georges Bizet’s Carmen, which was directed by Ray at the Mannes School of Music. This is when they fell in love and soon moved in together. (An amusing wrinkle in the story—Mark and Darcy
