By Anne Levin
Alexis Peart
(photo by Stephen Laschever)
When Mozart’s comic opera Cosi fan tutte is staged by the Princeton Festival this coming weekend, there is likely to be a substantial cheering section for the mezzo soprano taking the role of Dorabella.
She is Alexis Peart, and her artistic roots in the local area run deep. In fact, the accomplished 26-year-old opera singer cites her first operatic experience as a member of the children’s chorus at the Princeton Festival — in Carmen one year, and La Boheme the next.
Peart grew up in Titusville, in the house where her mother still lives. She studied voice, cello, flute, and violin at Westminster Conservatory of Music. She took classes at Princeton Ballet School. Her family attended Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church.
“Coming back here to perform is a very ‘kismet’ journey, and I’m so excited about it,” Peart said during a telephone interview last week. “With all that I have been doing, I haven’t been able to perform in proximity to where I grew up. I understand that a huge group from the church are coming. And of course, my mom is coming to all three shows.” more
Less than a week before Father’s Day, my son and I are talking about the time he fell off the sofa dancing around to Asia’s “Heat of the Moment.” It was mid-May 1983; he was 7. “But it wasn’t the sofa,” he tells me; he’s 48 now. “It was a bunch of cushions I’d piled onto a chair. I didn’t cry, I yelled, I kept jumping around. John Wetton was singing.”
Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, a month short of his 40th birthday. The word “Kafkaesque” reportedly entered the English language in the 1940s, the earliest usage being from 1947 in the New Yorker.
