AN AMERICAN STORY GETS A NEW LIFE

Lynn Nottage, John Legend, Whitney White,
and Adrienne Warren take on a story that
has been provoking America for nearly a century

Some source material arrives onstage carrying more baggage than most shows acquire in a lifetime. Imitation of Life has had nearly a century to accumulate its own.

Fannie Hurst published her novel in 1933, telling the intertwined stories of two single mothers, one black and one white, and their daughters against an America divided by race and class. The book was adapted almost immediately into John M. Stahl’s 1934 film with Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers, then radically reworked for Douglas Sirk’s sumptuous 1959 melodrama starring Lana Turner and Juanita Moore. Both films are now in the National Film Registry, and the differences between them offer their own record of how American attitudes toward race changed over 25 years. The Library of Congress calls the 1934 film an unusually significant early Hollywood treatment of black characters as fully developed people rather than comic figures or entertainers. Sirk’s version made racial passing and the tortured relationship between a black mother and her light-skinned daughter even more central.

Now Imitation of Life is becoming a musical, and the people doing the adapting are what make this world premiere especially tantalizing.

Lynn Nottage

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage is writing the book. That alone is a fascinating match of artist and material. From Ruined and Sweat to Intimate Apparel and Clyde’s, Nottage has repeatedly examined how race, class, work, money, and history shape private lives. Imitation of Life gives her an American story in which all of those forces converge inside two families.

John Legend

Then there is John Legend, writing his first musical-theater score. An EGOT winner moving into musical theater would already attract attention; doing it with material so bound up with Black identity, ambition, motherhood, passing, and the American Dream makes the choice considerably more interesting.

Whitney White (Elias Williams)

And now Whitney White is directing. The production was originally developed with Liesl Tommy at the helm, but White took over earlier this year. That puts three major black artists in charge of reexamining material originally written by a Jewish novelist in 1933 and twice filtered through Hollywood. What they preserve, discard, complicate, or turn inside out may be as interesting as the musical itself.

Adrienne Warren

The latest piece of that equation is Adrienne Warren, who will play Delilah. Warren won the Tony for creating Tina Turner on Broadway in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and the role here comes with formidable history. Louise Beavers played Delilah in 1934; Juanita Moore played the corresponding character, renamed Annie Johnson, in Sirk’s 1959 version and received an Academy Award nomination. Warren has been developing Delilah during the musical’s gestation, making this more than the casting of a star after the work was finished.

The new musical returns to 1920s Atlantic City and 1930s New York, where the two mothers and their daughters build a life together while pursuing love and success under very different circumstances. Beyond that, the most intriguing question is how Nottage, Legend, White, and Warren will reconsider a story whose ideas about race, identity, motherhood, ambition, and passing have been debated almost from the moment Hurst wrote it. That question finally gets an audience this fall.

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Imitation of Life
The Shed and National Black Theatre
The Griffin Theater at The Shed in New York
Nov. 21, 2026–Jan. 3, 2027
for tickets and more information, visit The Shed and National Black Theatre

for more shows, visit Theatre in New York
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