He trained at Yale and sang opera in New York, but now you can find baritone Steven Marking, who lives in Maplewood, on the Mississippi backwaters in a mallard-green pontoon boat, armed with a camera, crouched behind a blind.
Marking draws from 20,000 images and a couple hundred hours of footage when choosing the visuals of river life—water fowl, bald eagles—to run on the screen when he appears onstage to sing about the Mississippi aboard American Cruise Line riverboats May through October.
His 80-minute one-man show, Our Mighty Mississippi, comes to the Phipps Center for the Arts this month, featuring about 15 classic and original songs spanning rock, show tunes, ballads and bluegrass. “I want people to love the river,” Marking says.
Our Mighty Mississippi. 2 p.m. April 5–6; 7:30 p.m. April 7–8. $16–$23 adults.
Phipps Center for the Arts
