John Legend (Courtesy Photo)

‘Imitation of Life’ Moves Uptown: John Legend and Lynn Nottage Rewire a Hollywood Melodrama 

A new John Legend–Lynn Nottage musical is reframing one of Hollywood’s most charged melodramas for a New York that feels uncomfortably familiar with its questions.

This fall, IMITATION OF LIFE will arrive at The Shed as a strictly limited-run co-production with Harlem’s National Black Theatre, relocating Fannie Hurst’s 1933 story of race, class, and ambition from the movie house to an experimental arts space built to wrestle with the present.

Lynn Nottage (Courtesy Photo)

A classic story, newly contested

Hurst’s novel and its 1934 and 1959 Universal film adaptations followed two single mothers, one Black and one white, and their daughters as they build a shared household in Atlantic City and New York while navigating a country organized around segregation and aspiration.

At the center is the fraught bond between Delilah, a Black domestic worker, and her light‑skinned daughter Peola, whose ability to pass for white becomes both a survival strategy and a rupture—an allegory that has been debated, critiqued, and reclaimed across generations of Black artists and scholars.

In their joint statement, Nottage, Legend, and director Liesl Tommy lean into that tension rather than smoothing it over, calling the book “very much a product of its time” but insisting that its themes “continue to resonate today.”

They describe being drawn to the material’s “enduring emotional power” and its “potential to be reimagined in ways that feel both contemporary and urgent,” foregrounding Delilah and Peola Johnston’s journey as the emotional spine of the musical.

Why these artists, why this moment

The collaboration itself is a statement about where the American musical might be headed. Nottage, a two‑time Pulitzer winner whose work often dissects labor, race, and the costs of survival, has already helped reshape Broadway’s commercial vernacular with the book for MJ and the operatic Intimate Apparel.

Legend, an EGOT who has spent the last decade toggling between pop charts, social‑justice advocacy, and producing projects like La La Land, Jitney, and Jesus Christ Superstar Live, is composing his first full musical score—moving from interpreting songbooks to building one from scratch.

Tommy, the first Black woman ever nominated for a Tony for directing a play, brings a track record of re‑centering canonical titles around characters of color, from a people‑of‑color–led Les Misérables in Dallas to Disney’s first Frozen stage spectacular.

Her feature debut, Respect, turned Aretha Franklin’s biography into a study of voice, power, and control—a useful rehearsal for tackling a story that has historically struggled to grant its Black characters full interiority.

That this collaboration is being incubated by the National Black Theatre and The Shed is equally telling. NBT, founded in 1968 by Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, has evolved from a community‑based Harlem company into a Tony‑recognized producer that helped usher Fat Ham and Purlie Victorious to Broadway, insisting that Black theater not only enter mainstream institutions but transform them.

The Shed, with its sliding steel shell and multidisciplinary mandate on Manhattan’s west side, has built its identity on providing substantial resources to formally adventurous work rather than to finished brands.

Atlantic City, Harlem, and the afterlife of passing

Imitation of Life has always been a story about the economics of care: who cooks the pancakes, who owns the recipe, who gets to keep the profits and the dignity.

Set across 1920s Atlantic City and 1930s New York, the musical promises to trace how domestic labor and racial capitalism are braided into the American Dream, even as its heroines chase love, security, and a future for their children.

In contemporary discourse, “passing” has migrated from a strictly racial term to a broader vocabulary of performance—of gender, class, even algorithmic identity—but the stakes for Delilah and Peola remain bodily and brutal.

Legend’s pop‑soul vocabulary, filtered through Nottage’s dramaturgy and Tommy’s visual rigor, suggests a production interested less in campy nostalgia than in the ache of a mother watching her child choose a world that refuses to choose her back.

A limited run with long horizons

The Shed will host IMITATION OF LIFE at its Griffin Theater in fall 2026, with dates, casting, and additional creative team still to be announced, and a strictly limited presentation engagement signaling both scarcity and the possibility of future life.

Liesl Tommy (Courtesy Photo)

Behind the scenes, an army of producers—from National Black Theatre, Get Lifted Film Co., Crocodile Eyes, and Universal Theatrical Group to Broadway powerhouses Sue Wagner, John Johnson, LD Entertainment, and The Shed itself—positions the musical not as a boutique experiment but as a potential franchise in the making.

For now, though, IMITATION OF LIFE is something rarer in the commercial theater landscape: a canonized, contested text being handed to Black and brown artists with the resources to argue with it in public.

In a city where questions of race, class, housing, and belonging are written into the subway map, a story born on the boardwalk nearly a century ago is about to test how much its reflection has really changed. 

 theshed.org  

@TheShedNY