George Takei on stage in Allegiance at the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego, CA.
At 77, George Takei is still raising awareness…and eyebrows.
Is there nothing George Takei can’t do? At 77-year-old, the badass actor/activist is making his Broadway debut this fall in Allegiance.
The musical is an intergenerational tale with two love stories framed as the memory of a Japanese American war veteran reminiscing on the time his family spent in a Wyoming camp during the internment. It will open at a Shubert Theater in October. It had its premiere in 2012 at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego.
“I consider this my legacy project,” Takei told the New York Times. “This is the first time that this dark chapter of American history will be done on the Broadway stage.”
Takei, who spent about four years of his childhood living inside two different internment camps, is also helping fund the show, having put a substantial amount of his own money into the project.
He describes the show as “very, very personal” and a tribute to his parents, as well as the tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans ancestry locked away in internment camps between 1942 to 1946 under orders from President Roosevelt.
“The show’s backdrop is the imprisonment of innocent Americans simply because we looked like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor, but the story is universal — people falling in love, getting married, having a family,” Takei explains. “The musical will find an audience because whether you are white, black, Latino, young or old, people can identify with the idea of family and the stresses put on a family, which in this case were enormous.”
New York, anyone?
Learn more about Allegiance here.
See highlights from Allegiance here. Photo still from video.
Originally published on queerty.com.