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*The Race to Urga*
The Race to Urga
Music	Leonard Bernstein
Lyrics	Stephen Sondheim
Book	John Guare
Basis	Bertolt Brecht's play ; The Exception and the Rule

The Race to Urga, later renamed A Pray by Blecht, is an unfinished musical adaptation of the Bertolt Brecht play The Exception and the Rule.

Collaboration on the production was initiated in 1968, with Jerome Robbins asking John Guare to write the adaptation. Leonard Bernstein was to compose the music, with Stephen Sondheim onboard to write the lyrics.^[1] The new musical was announced to open at Lincoln Center in January 1969, but Robbins left the production during cast auditions, and the project folded.^[2]

No cast album was produced, though a demo was recorded in 1968.^[3] Jerome Robbins returned to the show, still incomplete, as director and choreographer of an April 1987 workshop production at Lincoln Center.^[4]^[5]

Synopsis

While never produced, the play featured a story within a story structure, with the musical numbers being part of a television play of The Exception and the Rule. According to Sondheim's book Look, I Made A Hat,^[6] "The theatre would be a television studio and the play presented as a television play... The star of the TV play (intended to be Zero Mostel) would be white and the Guide and the Coolie would be black, and the growing paranoia of the star that the blacks were getting all the attention... would parallel the Merchant's paranoia."

Workshop song list

Prologue Marches
Intro / In Seven Days Flat
You're In Hann
The Secret
The Suspicion Song
Coolie's Dilemma (lyrics by Jerry Leiber)
Doors to Urga
Get Your Ass In There
Coolie's Prayer
Number One
The Zorba's Dance

References

^ A Pray by Blecht Sondheim Guide
^ Long, Robert. "Broadway, The Golden Years: Jerome Robbins And The Great Choreographer-Directors : 1940 To The Present" (2003). Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 0-8264-1462-1, pp 133-134
^ Exception and The Rule Demo castalbums.org, retrieved December 9, 2009
^ Vaill, Amanda "Somewhere: The Life Of Jerome Robbins" (2006), p. 501 books.google.com, retrieved December 9, 2009
^ Leonard Bernsten Timeline, 1987 leonardbernstein.com, retrieved December 9, 2009
^ Sondheim, Stephen (November 22, 2011). Look, I Made a Hat. United States: Random House. pp. 310–318. ISBN 978-0-307-59341-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)