12 minute read
Once Upon A Time
By Joan Oldknow
Once 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 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 went on their first date in January, 1987 soon after they first met. Their second date wasn’t until two years later, in 1989, after Carmen! … That one stuck.) They quickly forged a connection to the Mountain Top, visiting the Krakauers’ house in Tannersville every August when Bill and his violinist wife Barbara traveled to France. Sometimes, David Krakauer, the world-renowned clarinetist who also performed in later years with the Catskill Mountain Foundation, would be at his parents’ house too.
Meanwhile, Ray, with a number of his students and colleagues, had formed a chamber opera ensemble called the Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, MCORE for short. They were a self-managed group whose members/performers did the artistic creation, preparation, training and work, but also handled the publicity, ticketing and all of the other performance related functions. After Carmen, the young group trained together almost daily for five years, studying voice and acting; movement and theater and even, for a few years, Flamenco dance in preparation for a larger Carmen performance, which would include singers as dancers, slide projections and a commissioned chamber orchestration of the score. During 1989-1994, Magic Circle Opera produced many performances. For a couple of years, the ensemble put on weekly performances at the Citicorp Center, and each year had at least one big performance, developing the company, its repertory and the participating artists. MCORE had a residency at LaMaMa, ETC., several festivals at Merkin Hall and produced several recordings.
During all those years, Mark was working on Wall Street, and it was a busy and rewarding time … crazy busy. In May, 1994, one month before their wedding, Mark had a health scare and realized that he needed to slow down. That meant cutting back his performance schedule and eventually changing teachers and studying with Dan Ferro, who had been Ray Harrell’s teacher and was a close friend of Ray. Dan worked with many great opera singers including the likes of Kathleen Battle, and taught at Juilliard for over 40 years. Mark studied with Dan until Dan passed away, about eight years ago.
Mark and Darcy met pianist Julia Mendelsohn in Ray’s studio, around the same time they first met each other. First as a studio coach and pianist, she later became a musical coach, musical director and accompanist for many of the Magic Circle performances. Mark and Darcy can’t say enough about Julia. She is not only an extraordinary pianist, but a brilliant musical arranger and director who, through her expressive playing and skillful insight into songs, brings emotion and beauty (and often humor), to their collaborations. Julia has become a much sought-after coach for child actors on Broadway, and her students have performed in many Broadway shows.
It was Bill Krakauer who made the initial connection between Mark and Peter. In the late 1990’s, when the old Orpheum Theater closed in Tannersville, Mark told Darcy that the theater should become their opera house. Mark said something to Bill Krakauer about it. Bill said, “If you really are interested in bringing the per- forming arts up here, I heard about this guy who is interested in the same thing. You should talk to him. His name is Peter Finn.” Mark called Peter, and they met at Mark and Darcy’s rental house in Jewett. Peter brought his binder and described his plans to renovate the barn in Hunter to be used as a performance space, and to buy the movie theater. Darcy remembers that Peter’s binder was full of ideas for the Foundation, and that most of those ideas have come to fruition! Mark told Peter that he was really a singer, but he worked on Wall Street and was hoping that his company would be sold. Mark was a partner in his company by then, and his plan was to leave and just sing. Mark said to Peter, “When your space is ready, if you want, we’ll do a free performance for you.” About six months later, when Peter called Mark and asked how soon they could perform, Mark and Darcy asked Julia to join them.
In 1997, Mark, Darcy and Julia had done their first show together as a trio at the Ethical Culture Center in NYC (Darcy was 7 months pregnant), calling themselves “The Funny Valentines.” According to Darcy, Mark and Julia are the real comics. (She is the accidental one). In 1998, The Funny Valentines’ first performance at the Red Barn was on a bare bones raised platform, created for the evening, with no lighting or set, just a trademark CMF beautiful piano. They rehearsed in the Red Barn the night before, driving up after Mark’s (half) work day on Wall Street. Their two boxer dogs, Bo and Tilly, and 10 month old son, Akiva, wandered around the stage while they staged the show!
For several years after, The Funny Valentines performed regular reviews at the Red Barn, mixing classical, Broadway and American Songbook repertory. In 2005, Pam Weisberg reached out to Mark and Darcy. She asked if they could create and perform two shows a year, starting immediately, or at least, as soon as possible. Mark proposed, and Pam helped found, a series called the Mountain Top Celebration of Song, which featured themed musical reviews with original scripts. The Funny Valentines ended up doing six shows over the next few years. The first show was called “Headliners and Oneliners: Songs and Stories of the Catskill Mountain Resorts.” The night of the show they ended up having to set up more chairs for the overflow audience. There was another show called “Weill’d About You,” featuring Kurt Weill’s work in Europe and America. Others included a show about
Speakeasies in the 20’s; a show built around the music of the sixties, and another built around stories, submitted in advance by members of their Mountaintop audience, about how people met and fell in love, called “We’re Playing Your Song.”
By then Mark’s ties to the CMF had developed in other ways. In 2002, Peter Finn asked Mark to join the Catskill Mountain Foundation board of directors. Mark had left his Wall Street firm, and spent a year as Executive director of a chamber music festiva—a festival supported pro-bono by Peter’s PR company. Mark became a CMF board member and worked part-time for the Foundation for the next eight years as the CFO. Eventually, Mark decided to step down. When Peter created FINN Partners, he asked Mark to work with him, first as a part-time writer and advisor, but eventually as CFO. Mark now works part-time as chief strategist for FINN Partners, which allows him time to perform and write plays and short stories. His play (with Tango music and dance) A Milonga for Gabriel Isaacs, co-written with John McCaffrey, was performed at LTV Studios in Wainscott, NY on October 21.
Mark’s singing has evolved over the years as he has moved away from opera and classical singing and gravitated towards more of a legit Broadway/Cabaret style. That music too has always loomed large in his life. His brother, Barry Singer, has written extensively about musical theater in The New York Times and many other publications, and his recently published book Ever After documents and comments on every Broadway musical produced between 1977 and 2020. As a boy, the room Barry and Mark shared was filled with the sounds of Broadway musicals. More recently, Mark has forged a close connection to his neighbor, Bob Dawson, one of the great private party jazz pianists in NYC. About ten years ago Mark started singing with Bob and his trio at the Harvard Club, which expanded his repertoire to include hundreds of songs. They performed some of that repertoire last spring at the Doctorow Center for the Arts in a video performance for the CMF (still available on the CMF’s YouTube channel at youtube.com/catskillmountainfoundation).
Mark loves not only the music, but the freedom of expression that comes with performing this repertoire. Singing with Bob’s trio and with Julia he can explore different approaches to the songs—most prepared, but some improvised in the moment. He doesn’t have to do it the same way every time and he is working with exceptional musicians who can both follow his instincts and explore their own. The combination of great musicians, wonderful material and freedom of performance is extremely rewarding. For Mark, one of the keys to being an effective performer is change—trying different things and keeping your audience involved by varying your approach and your interpretations.
In 2022, Darcy, along with cellist Mary Wooten, violinist Marshall Coid and pianist Elizabeth Rodgers, created a chamber music ensemble named The Moss Ensemble. They performed their inaugural concert at the CMF in April of last year, and will perform again at the Doctorow Center for the Arts on August 24, 2024. In- cluded in their first concert were songs by Windham Chamber Music’s own Robert Manno. Over the years, Darcy has been thrilled that her relationship to the CMF also led to a friendship and professional association with Bob and his wife, violinist Magdalena Golczewski, and to performances with the Windham Chamber Music Ensemble, under Bob’s baton. In these concerts and with Moss, she had the additional joy of performing the original song cycle, commissioned for her by Mark and written for her by Bob, entitled Three Songs on Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, first with orchestra and then with chamber orchestra ensemble. She loves performing for Catskill Mountain Foundation and on the Mountain Top. When she and Mark saw Pam Weisberg at the CMF benefit in 2021, after not having performed at CMF for a number of years, Pam said, “We hope you will come back.” Darcy replied that they will come back as often as they can!
Once Upon a Time, to be performed on Saturday November 11 at 8:00 pm at the Doctorow Center for the Arts, is a program of musical favorites by Sondheim, Bernstein, Gershwin, Rorem, Berlin and many more. It promises to be a retrospective of songs and past performances through the years that highlight the development of the Catskill Mountain Foundation, particularly in its early years. Mark is the emcee, a role that he enjoys because there’s nothing like getting a laugh (which he hopes he will). The program will revisit The Funny Valentines’ past with the CMF, but will also weave in Peter, Sarah, Pam and their extraordinary accomplishments over the past 25 years. It will be a musical celebration of 25 years of the CMF. In Darcy’s words, “Music and performance connect us.”
The Doctorow Center for the Arts is located at 7971 Main Street, Hunter, NY 12442. Tickets purchased ahead are $25 adults; $20 seniors; $7 students. Ticketing fees and higher at-the-door ticket prices apply. To purchase tickets, visit catskillmtn.org, call 518 263 2063, or email boxoffice@ catskillmtn.org.
