| The Race to Urga | |
| Music: | Leonard Bernstein |
| Lyrics: | Stephen Sondheim |
| 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]
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."