From L to R:
Janice Hall
Janice has had a long career as an opera singer, performing leading roles in major opera houses around the world. In addition to her classical work, she is now applying her musical talents to the art of cabaret. Janice received a 2011 Bistro Award and a 2012 MAC award for her debut show, Grand Illusions: The Music of Marlene Dietrich.
Janice’s operatic repertoire has included the title roles of Lucia di Lammermoor, Madama Butterfly, and Salome, as well as multiple roles in the operatic version of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. She was Violetta in the New York City Opera’s Emmy-winning PBS telecast of La Traviata. Other appearances include The Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center, The Santa Fe Opera Festival, Chicago Lyric Opera, the Vienna State Opera, London’s Covent Garden, and the Salzburg Festival.
In addition to singing, Janice has also performed with several New York City theater companies, and at the NY International Fringe Festival. She made her off-Broadway debut in 2012 in My Occasion of Sin at Urban Stages Theater.
Janice is thrilled to be a part of the beauty and connection that is Peaceable Hour.
www.janicehallsinger.com
Mark Watson
Trained on full scholarship at the Juilliard School of Music and winner of several international vocal competitions, Mark Watson has sung concerts, operas and oratorios in Israel, Italy and Belgium, and on national television in Japan. In New York City, he has appeared at Alice Tully Hall, Avery Fisher Hall and Carnegie Hall. He has performed at the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia, Orchestra Hall in Detroit and the Meadow Brook Festival.
In 2014, Mark was presented as Artist of the Year at the Max Fisher Music Center (Orchestra Hall), where he premiered David DiChiera’s hauntingly beautiful A Letter to Sarah, a concert aria for voice, trumpet and piano. Also in 2014, Mark sang the premiere of Michael Close’s Songs About Cheese, an Entertainment for voice, piano, violin, cello and bass clarinet, with Chamber Music of the Scarab Club. (Roquefort, Cheddar, String Cheese, Camembert, Limburger and Swiss are the featured cheeses.) Other performances in 2014 include Samuel Barber’s Dover Beach, the Mozart Requiem, Cesar Franck Mass, and songs by Kurt Weill, arranged for voice and string quartet.
Some highlights of Mark’s 2015 include the American premiere of Karl Jenkin’s cantata The Healer at Carnegie Hall (his 4th solo appearance there), and concerts at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach, in the Bahamas, for the Nassau Music Society, Pescara, Italy, for the Fondazione Pescara Abruzzo, and in New York City at the Knickerbocker Club.
Mark is equally at home in the worlds of musical theater and cabaret, and he is a frequent soloist in Orchestral Pops concerts.
Sarah Rice
Sarah began her career as The Girl in the long-running original Off-Broadway production of The Fantasticks. She originated the role of Johanna in Sweeney Todd on Broadway for which she won a Theatre World Award and recorded on RCA.
Opera/Operetta/Music Theatre/Theatre credits include: leading soprano and dramatic roles performed all over the world with a bunch of great people (Joan Sutherland, Richard Bonynge, Leona Mitchell, Marni Nixon, Angela Lansbury, Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim among others).
Sarah’s most recent credits and awards include: Multiple Bistro Awards and MAC AWARD winner, Female Vocalist for SARAH RICE sings SCREEN GEMS: Songs of Old Hollywood and THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOVE: Our celebration of Tom Jones & Harvey Schmidt (co-starring with Carole Demas). She has been a repeat favorite at the Caramoor Music Festival, singing and playing the theremin in the Evening At the Rosen’s series, the multiple award winning, Sondheim Unplugged series at Feinstein’s/54 Below and the Mabel Mercer Foundation Cabaret Convention. In June of this year, Sarah is thrilled to return to London to perform again in Sondheim Unplugged and her critically acclaimed solo show, MUSIC OF THE NIGHT: Memories, Dreams and Reflections at the famed Crazy Coqs.
www.SarahRice.com
Darryl Curry
Darryl Curry is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Episcopal Actors Guild, and the Woodstock Fringe Playwrights Unit. He is Director of Music at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church and works as a composer, musical director and performance coach in New York City.
He wrote incidental music for the 1999 20th Anniversary Off-Broadway production of The Elephant Man, and has had two musical works commissioned: The 46th Street Mass, commissioned by St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in New York, and the sung ballet My Shadow, based on the Robert Louis Stevenson poem, commissioned by the Staten Island Ballet.
Darryl was Playwright/Composer-in-Residence at The Third Step Theatre Company in New York from 1989 to 1992. Third Step produced his musicals The Elephant Piece and Quitters. In April 2014, The Elephant Piece was produced again, by Snowlion Rep in Portland, ME.
Darryl has written two plays, Heavenly Sunlight and Blue Skies, both of which were given readings by the Woodstock Fringe Playwrights Unit, in 2015 and 2016. He also has created a comic performance monologue, Time’s Here, which was produced in Atlanta, GA, by The Parenthesis Theater Club for their Buckhead Shorts series.
Staged readings of his musicals include: Dorian Gray (performed in 1996 by the Heliotrope Group, Ltd. in New York, and again in 2007 and in 2017 by Contempopera of Cleveland, Ohio); George Q (book & lyrics by MK Wolfe), performed at the Theatre@St.Clements in New York in 2000, (scenes from Act One were performed at NJ Rep’s Theatre Brut Festival in 2006); and Mesmerized (book by Al D’Andrea; lyrics by MK Wolfe), staged at The Playwrights’ Group in Los Angeles in 2004, under the auspices of the Women’s Club of Hollywood, and at the PortFest Fringe Festival in Portland, Maine (2012), produced by the Snowlion Repertory Company.
His current musical, BUZZ, Son of a Bee…an actor’s life for me (book by Andrew Johns; lyrics by Ariana Johns; produced by Vampingo Productions), was honored in 2014 with the Golden Fleece Ltd. 22nd Annual Award for Music Theatre in Progress. BUZZ has had performances in the Friday Night Footlights Series at the Dramatists Guild, New York (2014); the Actor’s Temple Theatre (2015), The Peccadillo Theatre Company (2015), ACA Galleries (2016), the Metropolitan Room (2016), and also had a 2-week run at the Sargent Theatre (2017). For more information go to:
www.buzzsonofabee.com.
Darryl is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (OH), Temple University (PA) and the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (NYC).
Bruce Cryer
Bruce has been called a renaissance man. At age 15 he sang in the choir for Duke Ellington and by 19 was playing The Boy in the world’s longest running musical, The Fantasticks, in a run lasting more than 800 performances. Trained at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, he has performed in Shakespeare in the Park, television commercials and films, ran a small art business based in New York City, and was a founding member of ODC, San Francisco’s top dance company.
He left his musical theater career to join the vibrant California business community and founded and/or managed several innovative businesses in the health care arena. Bruce continues to consult to health care organizations. He was a founding director of the acclaimed HeartMath Institute and CEO of HeartMath LLC for 11 years, during which time his clients included Stanford University, Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic, The World Bank, Unilever, Shell, Prudential Financial, the NHS, Cathay Pacific Airways, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Cisco Systems, and Yosemite National Park.
He has taught global executives at Stanford Business School, Columbia University Executive Program, Haas Business School at University of California Berkeley, and Nanyang Polytechnic University in Singapore. After fully recovering from a two-year health ordeal, he began to sing and dance again through a project he developed called What Makes Your Heart Sing. In 2017 he recorded his first album of original songs, entitled Renaissance Human.
His years in both the business and performing arts worlds led him to develop a body of work on Awakening Creativity which is now being taught at Stanford University, University of Delaware, the New York Open Center, 1440 Multiversity in Silicon Valley, and elsewhere. In 2018 he returned to NYC and rejoined the arts scene here. He has performed at the Norwood Club, Pangea, Don’t Tell Mama, the United Palace Theater, and St Clements Theater and Church.
His digital photography is available through Instagram and an Etsy shop. He is currently development director for Mise-en-Scene Studios (MESS), a vibrant performing arts organization supporting gifted young classical and opera musicians, based in the city. He is also part of the vocal ensemble at St Clements Church and Theater performing a program each week called Peaceable Hour.
David Vernon
Multi-talented Artist David Vernon has been described as “Other-Worldly” by his critics and peers. “I was taken with his voice—pure, ethereal, hauntingly beautiful” ~Roy Sander The Bistro Awards
David is a consummate and accomplished performer in every genre he approaches and leaves his stamp upon. His voice is that which a microphone was invented for. Vernon’s voice is a disciplined instrument. “His intonation and dynamics were impeccable all evening, and his aura saturated each tune, rendering them all uniquely his own” ~Remy Block Broadway World.
David has conceived, produced and delivered an extensive recording catalog of conceptual musical compositions throughout his career. “David Vernon is a remarkably unique talent whose stage presence is so riveting, it is virtually impossible to take your eyes off of him” ~Ron Forman Cabaret Scenes
