Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.
— Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
On October 30, 1949, a new, much-anticipated Broadway sensation opened at New York’s Music Box Theatre on West 45th Street. Composed by courageous German-born polystylist Kurt Weill, lyrics and book by veteran dramatist Maxwell Anderson, Lost in the Stars, an excruciatingly intimate portrait of apartheid, exploded onto the scene, a dazzlingly literate, multi-tonal stellar event of astronomical importance in the history of American music theatre.
Flooding the lofty semi-darkness of Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre Jeanne Lamon Hall with heartfelt speech and song on a gray, early spring afternoon last Saturday, Voicebox: Opera in Concert brought a shining measure of timelessness to Weill’s “Broadway opera”, excellent 16-member cast and 11-player chamber orchestra, a bright beacon of collective hope in what increasingly feels like an ever-darkening world.
The measured evolution of Lost in the Stars, prior to its Broadway debut, is something of a fraught tale of epic idealism and unflagging perseverance bounded by serendipity bordering on the fateful.
Anxious to sound the depths of racism in America, Weill and his trusted writing partner scoured the available inventory of appropriate source material. The pair’s oddly impulsive first choice, Harry Stillwell Edwards’ 1920 novella, Eneas Africanus, a questionable metaphorical nod to the virtues of post Civil War Reconstruction, inevitably proved glaringly inauthentic. Conversely, the somewhat unexpected international triumph of South African novelist Alan Paton’s heartrending dissection of institutionalized bigotry, Cry, the Beloved Country, first published in 1948, powerfully struck home. While not an overt frontal assault on grotesque Jim Crow-branded attitudes of African-American otherness, Paton’s plainspoken poetic prose, respectfully abridged by Anderson in collaboration with acclaimed director Rouben Mamoulian, coupled with Weill’s pulsing, energetic score, virtually guaranteed success, the ensuing adaptation a forceful plea for humanity. Everywhere. For everyone.
Cry, the beloved country,
Cry, the beloved land,
The wasted childhood,
The wasted youth,
The wasted man.
Lost in the Stars played for a staggering 281 performances in its first run, closing July 1, 1950, setting the course for other urgent landmark productions to follow — South Pacific, Flower Drum Song, West Side Story. The variety and depth of social/political/cultural crises confronted by like-minded creators thereafter would change Broadway forever.
Paton’s sharp, anguished story, markedly skeletonized for theatre, cut clean to the bone.
A young black man, his father a humble Anglican country priest, unthinkingly kills a wealthy white landowner’s son, setting in motion a chain of tectonic consequences, stretching from a hardscrabble Johannesburg shantytown to the grassy hills of Ixopo, that will ultimately transform the lives of shattered Africans and settlers alike.
Music here is as kaleidoscopic and diverse as the tumble of contagious emotion on stage. Jazz, blues, big band swing, European classical motifs, gospels, children’s songs, all boldly voiced by Opera in Concert’s nimble custom-assembled ensemble. Supple reeds sinuously foregrounded, piano, trumpet, percussion and strings — violins excluded per Weill’s explicit instruction — soundly led with appealing, understated flair by conductor Joel Goodfellow, endlessly stirred and surprised.
Singing the role of Rev. Stephen Kumalo, Leroy Davis deeply impressed, his warm, empathic baritone endowing the character with enormous pathos, a forgiving, infinitely solicitous envoy of Christian redemption shaken to the core of his faith. O Tixo, Tixo, help me! Memory is Kumalo’s constant companion. His son as an infant. When he lay on your breast/He looked up and smiled/Across tens of thousands/Thousands of miles. The little gray house he shares with his wife. There’s a lamp in the room/And it lights the face/Of the one who waits there/In her quiet place. All is consumed by a single act of senseless violence. Davis embodied every tear. A profoundly moving performance of limitless poignancy.
Featured in a principal non-singing role, performer Martin Gomes appeared as Kumalo’s long lost wayward son, Absalom, crafting a fine, touching portrait of the troubled character, supremely centred, passionately engaged. A rebellious, yet principled, vaguely saintly Absalom, perfectly in keeping with Lost in the Stars’ half-hidden Old Testament antecedents.
Sean Curran assumed the role of James Jarvis, grief-stricken farmer/father. A complex character forcefully inhabited.
Singer-actor Ineza Mugisha appeared as Irina, Absalom’s lover and wife-to-be, her silvery, ringing soprano keenly affecting, rendering Weill’s towering anthem to loneliness and pain, Trouble Man, with great dignity and soulful expression. Listen to my blood and my bones here talking. Heartbreaking in the extreme.
Soloing in a delightfully uproarious turn as Kumalo’s young nephew, Alex, Grade 7 student at St. Michael’s Choir School, Julian Bredin, all but stopped the show, his bright, highly polished handling of the composer’s irresistible nonsense song, Big Mole, a blessedly welcome moment of high stepping, twinkle eyed, utterly unselfconscious comic relief.
Tenor Ryan Allen sang the role of Leader, an emphatic, robust presence throughout the afternoon’s proceedings, part narrator, part sage, part Zulu everyman, arguably nowhere more commanding or pressingly charismatic than in his contribution to the ferocious choral setting, The Wild Justice. The wild justice is not found/In the haunts of men.
Mezzo-soprano Francesca Alexander portrayed Linda, a wickedly flamboyant produce seller, vamping and teasing with all the shameless, irresistible abandon of a sultry nightclub singer. Who’ll buy/My juicy rutabagas?/Who’ll buy/My yellow corn? A lilting, flouncy performance breezily gauged.
A vast variety of spoken compramari roles, Station Master to Prison Guard, all drawn from the ranks of the busy Opera in Concert Chorus — all equally well played — punctuated Maxwell Anderson’s bustling libretto to considerable effect.
Lost in the Stars would be the final entry in Kurt Weill’s weighty catalogue of 20th century activist music theatre, struck down by a massive coronary at the age of 50. With its bountiful, tirelessly animated revoicing of the piece, Opera in Concert gifted us with a reminder of all that made his work so compellingly everlasting.
I’ve been walking through the night and the day
Till my eyes get weary and my head turns grey,
And sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away,
Forgetting the promise that we heard him say —
And we’re lost out here in the stars.