First look rehearsal images are released as ‘Star Trek’ legend, activist and Broadway star George Takei prepares to make his London stage debut at age 85 in George Takei’s Allegiance, an uplifting story inspired by his own WW2 experience in a US concentration camp at the age of 5.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, California-born Takei and his family were placed behind the barbed-wire enclosures of United States’ internment camps along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans.
He spent years of his childhood at Camp Rohwer in the swamps of Arkansas and at wind-swept Camp Tule Lake in northern California. At the end of the war, Takei’s family returned to their native Los Angeles.
Inspired by this difficult chapter of American history, Takei developed the Broadway musical Allegiance, an epic story of love and heroism in which he starred alongside Tony Award winner Lea Salonga and Telly Leung in its record-breaking world premiere at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in 2012. The show won multiple awards and was followed by a Broadway run in 2015-2016.
Now Allegiance gets a new and more intimate production for the UK, conceived specifically for the Off West End space at Charing Cross Theatre, directed and choreographed by Tara Overfield Wilkinson (director, ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ UK tour, associate director/choreographer of ‘Come From Away’ UK).
Joining Takei will be his Broadway co-star Telly Leung (Broadway’s ‘Aladdin’ and TV’s ‘Glee’) and Aynrand Ferrer, who has just played the alternate Kim in ‘Miss Saigon’ in Vienna. All three are making their London stage debuts.
George Takei’s Allegiance will get its UK premiere at Charing Cross Theatre for 13 weeks from Saturday 7 January to Saturday 8 April, 2023.
