Karla Burns

Karla Burns (December 24, 1954 – June 4, 2021) was an American mezzo-soprano and actress who performed nationally and internationally in opera houses, theatres, and on television.

She made her professional stage debut in 1977 while still a WSU student at the old Victory Theatre in Wichita.

She graduated from WSU in 1981.

The part of Queenie in Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern's Show Boat became a pivotal role in Burn's performance career.

She first performed the part in 1981 at the Lyric Theater in Oklahoma City.

Her first major success was as Queenie in the Houston Grand Opera's 1982 revival of Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern's 1927 musical Show Boat.

This production premiered in Houston, and then toured nationally and on Broadway.

For her portrayal of Queenie, Burns won a Drama Desk Award and received a nomination for the Tony Award.

The role of Queenie became a pivotal part in Burn's career, and she portrayed the character in many productions internationally for two decades.

For this part, she became the first black person, African-American or otherwise, to win the Laurence Olivier Award, Britain's most prestigious award for theatre.

Burns's career spanned a broad repertoire from musical theatre, to opera, and stage plays.

Her work included performances with the Metropolitan Opera, Paris Opera, the Teatro Real, Cairo Opera House, and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

On the opera stage she was particularly associated with the role of Addie in Marc Blitzstein's Regina.

She toured nationally for many years in her one woman show, Hi-Hat Hattie, in which she portrayed fellow Wichitan Hattie McDaniel, the first black entertainer to win an Academy Award.

Born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, Burns was the daughter of Ira Willie Lee Burns and Catherine S. Burns.

The youngest of four children, Burns credited her parents with inspiring her love of music.

Her father was a jazz and gospel pianist and her mother, a seamstress and employee of the American Red Cross, sang spirituals and old hymns at church.

Burns graduated from Wichita West High School, where she played clarinet in the band and sang in the choir.

Burns attended Wichita State University (WSU), from which she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music Education and a BA in Theatre Performance.

At WSU she performed in several university productions: she was Polly Peachum in Bertolt Brecht,’s The Threepenny Opera, and also appeared in Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Leonard Bernstein's Mass.

She also toured Europe in performances with WSU's choir.

Her breakthrough performance as an artist was in that role in the musical's celebrated 1982 Houston Grand Opera (HGO) revival.

Directed by Michael Kahn and starring Lonette McKee and Ron Raines, the HGO production premiered at Jones Hall in Houston in June 1982, and then toured for performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., and finally at the Gershwin Theatre on Broadway in 1983.

Burns won a Drama Desk Award and was nominated for a Tony Award for her work in this production.

The HGO production also toured overseas to the Cairo Opera House in Egypt.

Burns commented in an interview that Egyptian audiences struggled to comprehend how a character with so little power could be important to the story.

She stated, "I'm of the belief that Queenie is a woman who just happened to have been born in a period that didn't allow her to speak her mind ... But in Egypt they took her name Queenie for Queen. It did something to them culturally, made them feel good about having dark skins. When I was doing interviews there, they really wanted to hear that she was more than just a boat's cook. I was able to tell them, she certainly was."

The role of Queenie became a staple part in Burns's repertoire; after the Broadway production ended, she went on to recreate the character in ten more productions during her career.

After the Broadway production of Show Boat closed, Burns was cast as Mary in Noa Ain's jazz opera Trio, which premiered at the American Music Theatre Festival in Philadelphia in July 1984 at the Philadelphia College of Art.

She reprised the role at Carnegie Hall the following October.

In 1985-1986 she starred in a 22-week run in Joan Micklin Silver and Julianne Boyd's A... My Name Is Alice at the Alley Theatre in Houston which later transferred to the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco.

She portrayed Bloody Mary in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific at the Darien Dinner Theatre in 1986.

She also recorded the role in 1988 for EMI Classics with the London Sinfonietta and a cast that included Frederica von Stade, Teresa Stratas and Jerry Hadley.

The most significant of them was a 1989 revival jointly mounted by Opera North and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

One theatre critic described Burns's Queenie as, "a dynamo dumpling with enough personality to light up a whole fleet of show boats".

When the show moved to the London Palladium in 1991, Burns's contribution to it won her the Laurence Olivier Award, the United Kingdom's most prestigious prize for theatre.

This was the first time that a Black artist was awarded this prize.

In 1994 she performed the role in concert at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre for the Edinburgh International Festival with Sally Burgess as Julie.

Burns again reprised the role of Queenie with Opéra national du Rhin in Strasbourg, France in 2002.

That same month she was a featured performer at the "Centenary Gala" celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of composer Jerome Kern at The Town Hall.