Solas An Lae will be one of many acts appearing at the Blackstone River Theatre Celtic Festival on Saturday at Diamond Hill Park in Cumberland.

The Blackstone River Theatre has been operating for seven years, drawing roughly 6,200 people a year to shows, classes and other events at their converted Masonic Temple in Cumberland, but managing director Russell Gusetti calls the first Blackstone Valley Celtic Festival “the biggest thing we’ve ever done as an organization.”

The all-day festival, scheduled for Saturday in Diamond Hill Park, also in Cumberland, is intended as a showcase for many of the different kinds of acts the theater presents on a regular basis. There will be two music stages, a stage for children’s entertainment and a stage for dance — both performing and participating.

While there’s a variety of music presented at the former Masonic temple in Cumberland, Gusetti calls Celtic music “one of our fortes, and it’s our first love.”

And the musical acts are familiar faces to BRT fans — from big names such as The Clancy Legacy featuring Aoife Clancy, Donal Clancy and Robbie O’Connell, and The April Verch Band, as well as local heavyweights such as Atwater-Donnelly, Pendragon and The Gnomes.

“All of these acts have played at the theater before,” Gusetti says, and the hope is to showcase the range of Celtic music, from Irish and Scottish music to Cape Breton tunes to everything in between. And after the festival, a Celtic session with nearly all the performers will be held back at the Blackstone River Theatre, for a chance to see and hear the players close up.

Eight of the artists have also donated two tracks each from their records to a compilation CD that will be sold at the park. “A lot of people have pre-conceived ideas” about Celtic music, Gusetti says, and he hopes to dispel some of them with the festival and the disc.

Gusetti describes Diamond Hill Park as “an underused, quite nice” park that hasn’t been home to any consistent programming in several years, since a free concert series dried up.

“It just felt like time to do a large scale event,” says Gusetti, who is also the festival’s producer and a member of Pendragon. “It’s really a way to reach out, and in one day potentially meet half the crowd you get in a year.”

Celtic music is alive and well in Rhode Island, but there hasn’t been a daylong festival of the music in at least 10 years, Gusetti says. “It’s because it’s a major undertaking, financially and time-wise,” he theorizes. Gusetti says he’s been “consumed” for four months with logistical details of the festival.

“If you’re going to do a festival, you really have to be prepared. It costs money and it takes a lot of time.” Since people can’t organize Celtic-music events on a full-time basis, Gusetti says, they do one-off events and series on a smaller scale, “and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think this is just part and parcel of what we do.

“And the main thing is, we hope you find more about the BRT and everything we do.”

The Blackstone Valley Celtic Festival will be held Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Diamond Hill State Park, on Diamond Hill Road in Cumberland. Tickets are $12 for adults, $10 for the elderly, $5 for children; children under 5 are admitted free. All tickets can be had at the door. Admission to the session is $15. The rain date is Sunday; call (401) 725-9272 or go to www.riverfolk.org.

rmassimo@projo.com