Dana faculty member to present 'Sarah's Song'
Staff report
YOUNGSTOWN
“Sarah’s Song,” an original musical narrative by Dana School of Music faculty member Suzanne Rouse Rudnytsky, will have its Youngstown premiere at 7:30 p.m. Monday in Bliss Recital Hall. The performance is free to the public.
“Sarah’s Song” is autobiographical and will be done in concert version in two acts with two performers: Leslie Chain will read the monologues while Rudnytsky sings the songs.
Retired Dana faculty member Roman Rudnytsky, who is Suzanne’s husband, will be the featured pianist on the 1972 recording of the Liszt Etude used in the production.
Rudnytsky wrote “Sarah’s Song” as her autobiography.
“The script for ‘Sarah’s Song’ took six months to write while the 15 songs in the musical were written over a 30-year period, but the emotions and experiences expressed in both took a lifetime of hard-won honesty to create,” said Rudnytsky. “I am Sarah and Sarah is me; once you know one, you know the other with naked, unadorned truth.”
Rudnytsky was raised a dairy farmer’s daughter in upstate New York, where she performed as a singer in coffee houses.
She graduated from the Boston Conservatory of Music, and then earned a master’s degree at Youngstown State University, where classical vocal music became her focus. After her marriage, she focused on opera, art songs and sacred music, often in recital with Roman.
Chain was the first American playwright-director and actress invited to Stanislavsky’s estate in Russia for the International Young Dramatists Festival. There, she read her first play, “Kiss Kiss,” which she would perform in several U.S. theaters and at YSU.
Her theater career began at the Youngstown Playhouse and Warren’s Kenley Players. She worked on the original production of “La Cage aux Folles” and had guest spots on several television shows.
For information about Monday’s performance, call the Dana at 330-941-3636.