History Knox
Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a column each Saturday that reflects on the history of the community.
MOUNT VERNON — The deeper you dig, the more interesting John Vining gets, and that’s coming after a very interesting surface layer.
Known locally for his decades of directing musical theater productions at St. Vincent School, that is merely one layer of an onion-like body of creative layers.
His latest remarkable invention will be a one-man play about the life of U.S. president and conservationist Theodore Roosevelt, to be presented Tuesday evening at the St. Vincent Parish House in Mount Vernon.
His adventurous path through the world of music began with an artistic family. John Kendall Vining, named after his great grandfather, came into this world in Grand Rapids, Michigan, courtesy of his parents, Dr. Keats Vining and his mother Janet (née Bird).
Though both parents were medical professionals, a love for music percolated throughout John’s childhood.
He might arrive home from school for lunch and find his parents tucking into chamber music for the break, with his father playing cello and his mother the piano.
John started on the piano at an early age, then added the violin and guitar later. By his late teens, he was contemplating a folk music career, a la Bob Dylan, but was stymied by the lack of any guitar program at Green Valley State University, where he began his studies.
At Green Valley State, music instructors noticed that John had “a rather fine operatic voice.” His teacher, Alice Dutcher, wrote to Boris Goldovsky and Anthony Addison at the Interlochen music summer camp, where he worked with voice coach Willis Patterson.
It was there he learned that an operatic voice could be developed. It wasn’t just something people were born with. He ended up making his operatic stage debut as a police sergeant in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at Western Michigan Opera.
He next got involved at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he earned a bachelor of music degree, while also completing music history and European languages degrees in the dual program with Case Western Reserve University for good measure.
He was then hired as an apprentice at Santa Fe Opera, one of the most renowned companies in the western U.S.
There he rehearsed extensively as a cover for the famed baritone Neil Shicoff, giving him many opportunities to work with a stellar cast on a production of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, in the role of Lansky.
He went on to work there in Strauss’ Salome and Rossini’s Le Comte Ory. He learned some key bits of stagecraft in the Sante Fe productions.
One was in the Te Deum section at the end of Act One of Puccini’s opera Tosca. A sense of a great number of people was needed for this scene, but the way the production achieved it was by a constant crossing of singers from side to side, then doing quick costume changes and crossing again.
This constant view of many different people milling about through the scene conveyed the sense of a crowd through only a handful of actual singers.
Another bit of theater magic was learned in a production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Vining played Puck. At the moment where Puck declares he’s headed off to travel around the world, the character was staged to bound upward on a trampoline, lit by bright stage lighting.
Vaulting above the line of light, Puck seemed to leap into the air and vanish, while in reality Vining simply landed out of sight offstage on a mattress braced by stagehands. Theater magic can be breathtaking.
In 1979, Vining moved to New York City to study with James Atherton and Marlena Malas, artists associated with the Metropolitan Opera. While some work was available in the city, it was limited, so instead of waiting around for an opportunity, Vining made one.
Around this time, he saw a Czech mime troupe called Lanterna Magica perform at the Montreal World’s Fair. The group would project film of a road onto a thin screen behind the mime, who would then react to things happening on the road.
Vining realized that this would be an effective way to set the scene in performances of arias from operas without pausing for a long verbal description, which kills the momentum.
Using an image of the old proscenium arch from the stage at the old Metropolitan Opera in New York, various backgrounds — designed by Bob Ballard — could be shown to set the scene while the music continued.
Vining had brief white-on-black title boards, like the ones you’d see in silent films, lettered by Jeanyee Wong, who did the calligraphy for Maurice Sendak’s children’s books.
As he set up Magic Lantern Opera of New York, Vining encountered many hurdles. One was that to project images at the distance and angle required for his backlit screen, he had to get a special — meaning expensive — wide-angle lens which project a flat image.
Additionally, he had to make arrangements of music from the operas and record it with a small ensemble. The music would then be triggered to start and stop via digital signals — an early use of such technology — as the slides were advanced and lights changed.
Vining sought grants to help cover the startup costs. Once everything was in place, Magic Lantern Opera was a hit, able to move nimbly from place to place; the company ended up performing all over the east coast and well into the interior as well.
At one point when the Memphis Opera company was having trouble doing runout performances, they hired Vining to provide their community reach out performances while they reorganized the company.
This also resulted in Vining performing with the company in Memphis, in Verdi’s classic Rigoletto.
In Chicago, he received a rave review from the notoriously tough critic John von Rhein in the Chicago Tribune when Vining played the role of Vašek in Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride.
Normally dismissed as comic relief, Vašek became a more fully fleshed-out character in Vining’s performance, leading von Rhein to suggest that perhaps Vašek would have been better for the heroine of the opera than the hero!
Further highlights to John’s opera career included working with composer Giancarlo Menotti, meeting Stephen Sondheim, and working on the revival of Virgil Thomson’s remarkable opera, The Mother of Us All, composed to a challenging non-linear text by poet Gertrude Stein.
He performed at different times all over the U.S., including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Carnegie Hall, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At one point he did a performance in Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center in New York City.
He laughs now about what his mother said to him before that performance: “I really think you could make it in this business,” she said.
Numerous performances everywhere confirmed that Vining had, in fact, made it.
One of his most remarkable adventures was his involvement in the 1984 revival of the wildly eclectic musical Dr. Selavy’s Magic Theatre, which started as a series of songs Stanley Silverman, the resident composer at the Stratford Festival in Canada, wrote for a production of the ancient Roman satire The Satyricon.
Silverman subsequently took the songs — ranging from operatic style to punk rock — and built a surreal show where a patient is taken through the worlds of these songs as a treatment in an asylum.
The piece used found objects and the unpredictably changing music, and the 1984 production is regarded as such an important theatrical landmark that a videotape of one of the performances is kept in the archives of the New York Public Library.
Vining is preserved there, along with fellow performers, Annie Golden, Jessica Harper, Roy Brocksmith and others. The production ran for months off-Broadway, and gave John the chance to meet musical theater legend Betty Comden, who was a fan of the show.
John remembers those years fondly, particularly remembering the sense of community among the performers with whom he worked. Far from the cut-throat competition of legend, Vining found New York theater to be a warm and welcoming family.
“I had a very lovely life in New York,” he says, smiling.
He has maintained friendships with his colleagues ever since, but something new moved into his life that made him reconsider his path. He met Linda Noble.
A New York attorney, Linda nonetheless had a great interest in music and singing. And John realized quickly that he had a great interest in Linda.
When John had to decamp from New York to the West Coast for an operatic production, he and Linda had to default to contact via correspondence. But that only made their connection stronger.
He soon realized that he had to look for a way he could actually be with Linda and not constantly on the road performing.
That’s when he made the shift to arts education and administration, the path which ultimately bought John and Linda to Mount Vernon, where they raised three children on a farm just outside of town on Coshocton Road.
They discovered that they loved their new life, and began doing performances on the side as The Vinings, reconnecting to the folk music both had long loved.
Set up with a grant from the Ohio Arts Council, The Vinings performed all over the state, including a songwriting program in schools where they would take student suggestions and create a new song on the spot and include it in their performance for the entire school.
It was also during this period that Vining worked with Jim Stoner to become part of the Community Concerts Association, touring widely to share music with audiences. This lasted for many years, though eventually The Vinings had to retire from touring when their children reached school age.
Performances of The Vinings can be seen on the YouTube channel which John maintains to this day.
One of his favorite memories from those years is the Rivers, Trails, and Ales Festival in Beverly, Ohio, which was started after the residents were inspired by The Vinings’ composition of a song, “The Wreck of the Buckeye Belle,” which drew on the Muskingum River town’s history.
Vining’s new creative activity shifted to 27 years of productions at St. Vincent’s School, which included Broadway musicals and operetta.
The 54 musicals produced over the years included a version of Sondheim’s Into the Woods, which was set in a library, which served as a platform for having characters from other fairy tales not used in the show to appear as extras in crowd scenes.
An original Christmas show was prepared every year, with development help from the students themselves. John retired a few years ago, but unfortunately lost his beloved Linda two years ago.
It was time for him to find a new creative activity to animate his days.
His new Teddy Roosevelt show, Speak Softly, but … An Evening with Theodore Roosevelt was developed after he had performed Roosevelt in a Chautauqua-style presentation as part of Jim and Amy Stoner’s Madcap Living History series at the Woodward Opera House.
The first part of the play shows Roosevelt arguing with then (1912) president William Howard Taft over Taft’s moves to open up U.S. public land for mining, a theme as timely today as ever.
The second part shows Roosevelt giving a speech shortly after an assassination attempt which slowed but didn’t halt the former president as he ran once again for the office.
Not unlike Vining’s classic Magic Lantern days, his set for the show is provided via projections of a fireplace from Roosevelt’s actual home, and the back of a campaign train for Part Two.
Vining listened to the few surviving recordings of Teddy Roosevelt, drawing on his understanding of musical recordings to realize that most modern portrayers pitch Roosevelt’s voice too high.
This happens due to the frequency limitations of early recordings, which capture the upper range better than the lower range. Comparing this sound to early recordings of tenors like Enrico Caruso, Vining was able to better reconstruct Roosevelt’s voice based on his knowledge of the tenor singing voice.
He also listened to the more extensive recordings of Roosevelt’s capricious daughter Alice in order to master the Mid-Atlantic accent common in the New York upper classes of the period.
After this launch, Vining hopes to take his show far and wide, for Roosevelt really speaks to him, both for his interest in conservation, as well as in the way that Roosevelt promoted Biblically-grounded policies — caring for the poor, avoiding war — without pushing a particular religion.
Above all, Roosevelt found ways to bring people together in order to solve problems, something from which a lot of today’s leaders could learn.
The performance of Speak Softly, but… An Evening with Theodore Roosevelt will take place Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026, at 7 p.m. at St. Paul’s Parish House, 100 E High St in Mount Vernon.
Admission is by a suggested donation of $10. For further information, call 740-326-1999.