The Theater: New Musical Play in Manhattan, Nov. 7, 1949

Lost In the Stars (words by Maxwell Anderson; music by Kurt Weill; produced by the Playwrights’ Company) refashions Alan Paton’s moving story of South African race relations, Cry, the Beloved Country, into a kind of choral drama. It tells of an old Negro’s search for his errant son, who has killed a great white champion of the Negro race, of the boy’s repentance and death, and of the symbolic coming-together of the two stricken fathers.

To the fierce sufferings of humanity the musical, like the novel, brings a real humaneness and makes a frontal emotional assault that has strong popular appeal. It is indeed the very pull of the thing that, for want of judgment, helps to pull it down. Thus, though the story has been greatly simplified, the effect is less movingly simple. For one thing, formal primitive speech often sounds stilted when spoken. But on the stage, sometimes a gesture is better than any speech; sometimes words don’t need music, nor does music need all the stops pulled out. Too often in Stars a wave of honest feeling brings a backwash of sentimentality; too often the show feels that the more it dots its i’s, the more the audience will dab at theirs.

The production has many merits: Rouben Mamoulian’s swift, pictorial staging, some of Kurt Weill’s music, Todd Duncan as the father, Julian Mayfield as the son, ten-year-old Herbert Coleman bringing down the house with Big Mole. But with half as much, Lost in the Stars might have been twice as good.