A race-themed work not performed in L.A. for 67 years is back for a Black Lives Matter era
CAP UCLA, in partnership with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and NY-based SITI Company
The rarely-reproduced Broadway show from the 1940s, Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson's "Lost in the Stars," will be presented at UCLA's Royce Hall.
"When Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s hit 1949 Broadway production of “Lost in the Stars” went on a nationwide tour, black audience members in many Southern cities were required to watch the musical from segregated balconies — a reality that must have felt particularly cruel given the work’s story line.
Set in apartheid-era South Africa, “Lost in the Stars” is based on Alan Paton’s novel “Cry, the Beloved Country.” Weill and Anderson chose the book as the subject of their operatic Broadway play specifically because its African story line so directly addressed the realities of a still-segregated America.
In Los Angeles, one of the more progressive stops on that 1950 tour, audience members were racially integrated. That performance –– produced by the long-defunct Los Angeles Civic Light Opera at the historic Philharmonic Auditorium at 5th and Olive streets –– is believed to be the last time L.A. audiences could see a professional production of “Lost in the Stars,” until now."ó Catherine Womack, January 12, 2017
Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times website.
Read an interview with Jeffrey Kahane at the Broadway World website.