CHARLESTON, S.C. – Not to be a New York snob, but the ones who really got the action started at the Spoleto Festival USA were the artists from New York.

The most coveted ticket here is the new production of “La Bella Dormente Nel Bosco,” directed by a puppet artist, Basil Twist, and conducted by Gotham Chamber Opera’s Neal Goren. The opera tells the story of Sleeping Beauty using Ottorino Respighi’s original 1922 orchestration. It has never been presented in America, and its run at Spoleto is sold out. But we New Yorkers are a lucky bunch. The production comes to the Lincoln Center Festival in July.

With audiences responding so enthusiastically to the show, it was a natural that the party in its honor would be a hit. Shea and John Kuhn, who run a law practice together, welcomed more than 100 benefactors to their 1905 Queen Anne Colonial after the Sunday afternoon performance. It was their first time as hosts of a Spoleto party.

Most of the cast – more than 20 puppeteers and singers – showed up, glowing and hungry.

“We had so much fun,” Mr. Kuhn, a retired state senator in South Carolina, said the morning after. “One of the reasons is the opera is so upbeat. It’s a classic story with a happy ending, and it puts you in the right mood to party. I think it’s our favorite Spoleto performance ever.”

The cast had so much fun they stayed for hours after the party was over, chatting with the Kuhns on the piazza and eating traditional Charleston cocktail-party fare: marinated shrimp with garlic, onions, and capers.

The ebullient couple has a special attachment to Spoleto, having seen what is now their second-favorite Spoleto performance in 1990, a few weeks before they were married.

“It was ‘Figaro,’ and I was told the performance was sold out. So I decided to go down to the theater and scalp tickets,” Mr. Kuhn said. He’d done it many times in his native California.

“I spent half an hour in front of the Dock Street Theater, saying ‘Two tickets.’ Nobody had any,” Mr. Kuhn said. “I’m a gregarious and outspoken person, so I was surprised.”

Ten minutes before the curtain, a man asked if he needed help. Mr. Kuhn explained his plight, and a few minutes later the man came back with two tickets and introduced himself. He was the general director of the festival, Nigel Redden, and it is one of his favorite Spoleto stories.

It reminds me of my favorite Spoleto story, the story of how Stephen Colbert, of “Daily Show” fame, met his wife, Evie. Both grew up in Charleston. “I attended the boys ‘school, Evie the girls’ school,” Mr. Colbert told me last month at a benefit for Symphony Space. “But we’d never met until this Spoleto concert; it was Philip Glass.” The couple now lives in New York.

Mike Daisey came to Spoleto with his wife, Jean-Michele Gregory, who directs his new monologue, “The Ugly American.” I ran into him at the cast party in his honor, held by fellow New Yorker Corbett Price, who recently bought a home in Charleston, where his girlfriend, Vicki Davis, grew up. The two met on Martha’s Vineyard.

Mr. Price is chairman of Kurron, a restructuring consulting firm specializing in the health-care sector. His Charleston home faces the water on Murray Boulevard, but Mr. Price hasn’t moved in yet. So at the party there was no furniture. But there was lots of food, with a distinct New York accent: potato latkes with osso bucco and smoked salmon made by J Bistro of Mount Pleasant, a suburb.

A neighbor, James Geiger, who installs high-end stereo systems in mansions up and down the East Coast, supplied the stereo and tunes.

And some of Charleston’s most prominent citizens, such as Charles Ravenel and John Dunnan, turned out, making Mr. Price’s debut on the social scene a success.

The Daiseys, dressed in standard New York black, made themselves comfortable on a cozy wrought-iron bench in the garden – the only seat at the house. There Mr. Daisey pondered doing his show outside New York.

“I have this line about attending a micro-Ivy college. I’ve found it works better here when I say ‘small liberal New England college,’ ” Mr. Daisey said. “It’s about their joy of laughing at things New England.” The audience also loved his self-mocking description of “the doughy, pasty, New Yorker-reading theater types.”

The Spoleto party scene tells a larger story about a new group of social movers and shakers who are transforming Charleston into the New York of the South, as it was known before the Civil War.

The New Guard is made up of couples in their 30s and 40s with young children who attend the city’s most prestigious private schools together – about half the first-grade class at Charleston Day School was born outside Charleston.

This year, more of these couples are throwing Spoleto parties than ever before, thanks to a hospitality committee composed of some of the most energetic young women in this set: Meredith Dunnan, Christine Landers, and Liz Sullivan.

Mrs. Dunnan and her husband, John, came here from Washington. Mr. Dunnan is an artist with his own gallery who has helped bring significant cultural figures to Charleston, including Yo-Yo Ma. The Dunnans were host to two parties over Spoleto’s opening weekend in their 1807 mansion on East Bay, which is filled with art.

An artistic renaissance is part of the second Charleston renaissance. The first was between the world wars, when George Gershwin wrote “Porgy and Bess” and artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper visited and painted here. Galleries are everywhere downtown, and 12 of the best recently formed the Charleston Association of Fine Art Dealers, which mounts an annual show in November.

“There’s less pressure here, so people are definitely coming here to buy,” a former New Yorker, Hilgur Schmidt of Montagu Street, said.

The Dunnans are so happy in Charleston that friends Steven and Elizabeth Dixon have moved here to join them. They previously lived in New York and Washington.

“We’re part of the post-9/11 trend,” Mrs. Dixon said.

“In New York it was money that motivated everything. In D.C. it was power. Here, if you come and talk about it all, that’s what gets you in trouble,” Mrs. Dixon said.

The couples also believe that this is a great place to raise children. Daddies go home at lunch, and children mind their manners. After seeing the Colla Marionettes, for example, I asked a child if he had liked the show. The boy said: “Yes, ma’am, I did.”