“David Roussève’s stunning choreography was about propulsion, as though warning how injustice thrives when events are allowed to control the will of the people.”
In January 2017 David Roussève choreographed an all-new CAP/UCLA Royce Hall production of Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars directed by Anne Bogart with music direction by Jeffrey Kahane, performed by SITI company, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and four opera singers. For his final Broadway score, Weill gave passionate voice to this powerful, uncompromising social indictment of apartheid South Africa. He and his librettist Maxwell Anderson adapted Alan Paton’s great novel Cry, the Beloved Country for the Broadway stage in 1949.
The work, which was widely acknowledged as one of the most important works of that season and a landmark in the history of American musical theater, ran for more than 300 performances. However, when the producers learned that for the planned national tour the black cast members were denied the right to stay in the same hotels as the white cast members, the nation tour was cancelled, and as a result only a few places in America have ever had the opportunity to see and hear a live performance of the work.
Photos by Reed Hutchinson courtesy of UCLA.