Lost in the Stars

It might be surprising to see Kurt Weill on a list of underrecognized mid-century American operas. Even with his firmly established legacy, with works frequently produced, Weill’s “musical tragedy” with frequent collaborator Maxwell Anderson is a gem ready to be unearthed. Weill aimed, in his own words, to “give a picture of the whole world today” – that is, an America plagued by racism in the years following World War II. Adapting Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country for the stage allowed Weill and Maxwell to explore the plight of Black Americans from a distance. The novel and opera are set in South Africa at the beginning of apartheid, a period of legal racial segregation and discrimination lasting over 40 years.

Lost in the Stars follows the Reverend Steven Kumalo, a Black Anglican priest, as he searches for his son Absalom in Johannesburg. Once working in the mines, Absalom is now out of jail on parole, living in a shantytown with his pregnant girlfriend. To gain money for his future child, Absalom decides to rob a white man with his friends. Caught in the act, he fires his gun in a panic, killing Albert Jarvis, a benefactor of Steven’s church. Steven pleads with Albert’s father, the wealthy and decidedly racist James, to intervene so that Absalom can avoid the death penalty, but James refuses. With no benefactor and no faith, Steven resigns from the church. At the hour of Absalom’s hanging, James arrives at Steven’s house a changed man. He admits that they have both lost a son. Steven and James commit to worshiping together and letting the young boys they each are raising play together.

Weill’s works fall somewhere in the spectrum between opera and musical theatre, but Lost in the Stars might be considered its own unique form. Virgil Thomson was not the biggest Weill fan, but he loved Lost in the Stars, calling it “[a] masterpiece of musical application to dramatic narrative…a play with musical numbers, a Singspiel.” More recently, composer Mark N. Grant said, “Seen in the theatre, the work plays not as a musical or opera so much as an intense dramatic play enhanced by music, poetry, and movement.” Weill and Anderson avoided the form debate altogether by labeling it “a musical tragedy in two acts.”

Lost in the Stars defies musical conventions as well. As reviewer Susan Galbraith describes, Weill’s poly-stylistic score “creates rich and sometimes intentionally jarring textures: jazz, popular song, strongly driven percussion passages…to conjure an African sound, extremely modern non-melodic passages, liturgically-inspired music, and complex operatic numbers.” Countering this wide-ranging score are numerous book scenes, some of which have underscoring, others are only dialogue. With 10 non-singing roles, director Tazewell Thompson says that when casting Lost in the Stars, “You need the voices, but you also need the actors.” The work also requires a significant chorus – a “principal player” itself, says Grant. The opera chorus functions as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action from a perspective unavailable to the characters in the piece. Grant says, “In no other musical in the Broadway literature does the chorus provide so much momentum, or interact so seamlessly with the parallel score of solo songs, as in Lost in the Stars.” With such diverse casting needs and an abundance of meaty roles, producing this piece is an opportunity to showcase the many talents of a college or a community.

Lost in the Stars has great potential for mass appeal, even today. On the work’s premiere, Weill said, “The real success of the piece to me is the fact that the non-specialist audience accepted a lot of very serious, tragic, quite un-Broadway-ish music of operatic dimensions, together with some songs written in a more familiar style.” In addition to the accessible music, audiences today will readily understand the racial conflict at the center of the piece. Moreover, though Lost in the Stars is a domestic drama, the piece clearly illustrates the structure of apartheid and its devastating effects on society at large. Elizabeth Vincentelli explains, “The point of the show isn’t to question individual faults, but how apartheid poisoned people.” This approach is crucial at a time when some Americans deny the existence of systemic racism in our country, even going so far as to erase the idea from K-12 curricula. Though the subject matter is heavy, the piece offers hope. As critic Michael Billington of The Guardian puts it, “Instead of the manufactured uplift of modern musicals, we are offered an overwhelming moral statement about our common humanity.”