Being bad has never been so good as College of Fine Arts students and professors perform opera and drama pieces as “Saints and Sinners,” the first performance of the annual President’s Festival of the Arts, at 8 tonight in Reynolds Performing Arts Center.

The festival, which began as a one-time concert for the OU president, is a weekend-long fine-arts event in which all the schools of the Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts participate.

The opera segment will comprise scenes from composer Wolfgang Mozart’s tragic dramedy-opera, “Don Giovanni,” that reflect what it means to be sinful.

“Don Giovanni is one of the great ‘sinners,’” said music professor Jonathan Shames, who performs Friday night. “He flouts all behaviors deemed moral, and in his profligacy, damages many lives around him.”

Shames said music professors Lorne Richstone and William Ferrera worked with the student performers to constantly practice.

“Performance opportunities such as those this festival offers allow them to test this development, to experiment, to see how far they can go,” he said.

The drama scenes comprise excerpts from the plays “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Steel Magnolias” and “As It Is in Heaven,” all of which involve the internal conflict between good and evil within characters of the plays, said drama professor Rena Cook, who produced and directed the three performances.

“Through struggle, the characters [in the plays] achieve higher goodness as a result of the way they are tested in these circumstances,” said Cook, who teaches voice, speech and dialects in the School of Drama.

In Harper Lee’s “Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch decides to represent a black man on trial for rape though he knows he cannot win in order to confront the racial prejudice of Maycomb, Ala.

Robert Harling’s “Steel Magnolias” character Shelby, a Type 1 diabetic, decides to have a child though she knows the potentially fatal complications that could result from the pregnancy.

“As It Is in Heaven” is a play about a young woman’s struggle against her Shaker community in Kentucky after claiming to have had religious visions of angels, Shaker founder Ann Lee and George Washington.

Cook said audiences could learn how they themselves can take the “higher road” through the performances this weekend at the President’s Festival.

“We’re all faced with ethical dilemmas,” she said. “When we experience challenges … we have to speak up for what we really want, to stand in the face of resistance.”

The President’s Festival continues Friday night with ballet and music performances by dance and music students and professors and Sunday afternoon with a performance of composer Felix Mendelssohn’s Biblical oratorio “Elijah” featuring the OU Combined Choirs and Symphony Orchestra.