by Douglas Watt
Source: New York Daily News (?), September 7, 1949
Kurt Weill said they had listened to 800 Negro singers in casting Lost in the Stars, the new musical he and Maxwell Anderson wrote, and that not one of them had a southern accent. “The baritones all sang ‘Old Man River,’ the tenors ‘Without a Song’ and the sopranos ‘Cindy Lou.'” The latter is Oscar Hammerstein’s version of the “Habanera” from Carmen, used in Carmen Jones.
“They used a different version of ‘Old Man River,'” Weill went on, leaving out words like ‘darky.’ It’s all happened in the past ten years, their losing that southern accent, and it’s an encouraging thing, in a way. [Note: The word “darky” appears in single quotation marks in the original, though it is not part of a phrase enclosed in double quotation marks.]
“I’ve been trying, ever since I came to this country, to work toward an American idiomatic opera — we probably shouldn’t use that word — in my shows. I think Street Scene was my biggest step in that direction. The last half was rained out at Lewisohn Stadium this summer, but I was glad to see how enthusiastically the people received what they heard of it. I think the universities will start doing it next . . . Ann Arbor, probably, next year.
Slightly Wrong
“You were wrong about ‘Lost in the Stars,’ the title song of our new show. It wasn’t written for Knickerbocker Holiday, but for another show Max and I wrote four [sic] years later, a show called ‘Ulysses Africanus,’ a Negro show that never got on. Walter Huston didn’t record it until 1945, when they put it on the back of his recording of ‘September Song.’
“Rodgers and Hammerstein have helped the idea of a genuine Broadway lyric theatre immeasurably, but they are like Standard Oil in their field . . . it would be silly to compete with them. I have to work in my own way.”
The small, gentle, tremendously accomplished composer walked on to a rehearsal . . .
Editor’s note: The remainder of the article consists of an interview with actor Tom Ewell and has nothing to do with Weill or Lost in the Stars.