Photographs by William Taufic.
Bea Crumbine’s voice has been heard around the world. She spent fourteen years in Europe and the Far East after college, singing in international choirs. Bea and her husband, Peter, then settled in Greenwich, where her voice continues to be heard, not only in song but also as a unifying force for countless arts organizations.
Bea spent five years working on the Greenwich Center for the Arts, a proposed major arts center in the Havemeyer Building, where the Board of Education is located. Ultimately the Board of Ed chose not to relocate, but Bea says, “The results were incredibly tangible for me. I met so many people in the arts.” Bea’s network includes Greenwich Ballet Academy, Greenwich Arts Council, Connecticut Playmakers, the Acting Company of Greenwich, Play With Your Food, Shakespeare on the Sound, instrumental groups, vocal groups…. “It has been a great pleasure for me to try to meet their needs in other places,” says Bea. She proceeded to secure funding to restore St. Bede’s Chapel, which now serves as a performance venue for Backcountry Jazz and Palladium Musicum. Bea also has been a long-time supporter of Curtain Call, Connecticut Ballet and the Avon Theatre in Stamford.
In addition to twenty seasons with the Connecticut Grand Opera and Orchestra, Bea sang with the Grace Notes, a music therapy group, for years. “We sang in hospitals, day-care centers, nursing homes and at town functions,” explains Bea, not to mention at the White House. She sang in Carnegie Hall with New York Grand Opera and at the Vatican with the St. Gregory Festival Chorus. “The arts renew and expand our lives enormously,” says Bea. “It’s almost spiritual. The more I can bring that to people, the happier I am.”
As a “great Italophile,” Bea also spent a year developing an exhibition, From Italy to America, with the Greenwich Historical Society. “I recognized that many Greenwich families have Italian surnames. I found that most came from two towns in Italy, going back to the 1880s, when stone masons and gardeners came to work at the massive estates being built here at the time.” Historical Society Director Debra Mecky comments, “Bea played a vital role in galvanizing the Italian community to participate.”
Bea helped declare the two Italian towns, Rose and Morra De Sanctis, Greenwich sister cities, and officiated at the induction ceremony in English and Italian. Not surprisingly Greenwich has named Bea its Ambassador-at-Large and friend and real estate mogul Peter Malkin describes her as “perhaps the leading volunteer supporter of the arts in Greenwich.”