Jackson Advocate

Todd Duncan
To Open Concert
Series At
Jackson College

Todd Duncan, the world famous singer, after an absence of two seasons during which he starred on Broadway and on a coast-to-coast tour in the Maxwell Anderson-Kurt Weill Musical Play, "Lost in the Stars," who is soloist with a number of orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony, is returning to the concert stage during the coming season and will appear here Sunday, October 31st at 4:00 PM, at Jackson College.

A large audience awaits the popular baritone who has won personal and musical fame in the theatre, on the opera stage, in recital and radio, with orchestra and in oratorio, and on records.

The singer left academic life as a young man to create the role of Porgy in George Gershwin's folk-opera, "Porgy and Bess."

Since that spectacular start, Todd Duncan's reputation has spread throughout both Americas, Australia and New Zealand, and Europe.

During 1945 he went to South America for the first time. During 1945-46 he joined the New York Opera Company, doing Tonio in "Pagliacci" and the Toreador in "Carmen." In the summer of 1946 he made his first visit "Down Under." A full season's concert tour at home led into an extensive tour abroad of England, Scotland, Belgium, Italy and Scandinavia. He returned to Europe again in 1948. It was in the summer of 1949, during a second Australian tour, that he received a series of telephone calls from New York offering him the lead in "Lost in the Stars," the stage adaptation of Alan Paton's best-selling novel about South Africa, "Cry the Beloved Country." When the musical play opened in New York on October 30, 1949, Todd Duncan had a personal success rare in the theatre. In the key role of the Zulu minister who leaves his humble flock to search for his son who has gone astray in the great city of Johannesburg, Duncan was described as "the perfect choice" by the New York Herald Tribune, who "sang magnificently and captured in his acting the sincerity of the kindly old man who comes through a terrible ordeal," in the words of the New York Times. "There was positive radiance in his performance," wrote the New York World-Telegram and Sun.

TODD DUNCAN, Baritone Star of Concert, Opera, Stage, and Screen will appear Sunday, October 21, in Dansby Hall Auditorium, Jackson College. This opens the concert series presented by the Lyceum Association, a community organization.

This opens the concert series presented by the College Lyceum Association.