Karla Burns

Karla Burns (December 24, 1954 – June 4, 2021) was an American mezzo-soprano and actress born and raised in Wichita, Kansas. The youngest of four children born to Ira Willie Lee Burns and Catherine S. Burns, she grew up in a household shaped by music: her father was a jazz and gospel pianist, and her mother sang spirituals and hymns at church. Burns attended Wichita West High School, where she played clarinet in the band and sang in the choir, before enrolling at Wichita State University. There she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music Education and a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Performance, appearing in university productions of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and Leonard Bernstein's Mass, and touring Europe with the university choir. She made her professional stage debut in 1977 at the Victory Theatre in Wichita while still a student, graduating from Wichita State in 1981.

The role that defined Burns's career was Queenie in Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern's 1927 musical Show Boat. She first performed the part in 1981 at the Lyric Theater in Oklahoma City, but her breakthrough came with the Houston Grand Opera's celebrated 1982 revival, directed by Michael Kahn and starring Lonette McKee and Ron Raines. That production premiered at Jones Hall in Houston in June 1982 and subsequently toured the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., before arriving at the Gershwin Theatre on Broadway in 1983. For her portrayal of Queenie, Burns received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical and a nomination for the Tony Award. The Houston Grand Opera production also traveled to the Cairo Opera House in Egypt.

Burns reprised the role of Queenie in ten additional productions over the course of her career. Among the most significant was a 1989 revival jointly mounted by Opera North and the Royal Shakespeare Company. When that production transferred to the London Palladium in 1991, Burns received the Laurence Olivier Award, becoming the first Black artist to win Britain's most prestigious theatre prize. She recorded the role in 1988 for EMI Classics with the London Sinfonietta alongside Frederica von Stade, Teresa Stratas, and Jerry Hadley. In 1994 she performed Queenie in concert at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre for the Edinburgh International Festival, with Sally Burgess as Julie, and she returned to the character once more in a 2002 production with Opéra national du Rhin in Strasbourg, France.

Following the close of the Broadway Show Boat run, Burns appeared on Broadway again in 1987 as the Duke of Ephesus and Luce in the Lincoln Center production of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, a production featuring The Flying Karamazov Brothers that was filmed for PBS's Live from Lincoln Center. She returned to the play in 1992 as Nell in New York's Shakespeare in the Park, which starred Marisa Tomei, and appeared at Shakespeare in the Park again in 1993 as Mistress Overdone in Measure for Measure alongside Kevin Kline, Blair Underwood, and Andre Braugher.

Burns's opera career brought her to some of the world's leading houses and companies, including the Metropolitan Opera, the Paris Opera, the Teatro Real, the Cairo Opera House, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in 1989 as Lily in George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. On the opera stage she became particularly associated with the role of Addie in Marc Blitzstein's Regina, which she first performed at the Long Wharf Theatre in 1988 and later reprised with Opera Pacific in 1996 and the Chautauqua Opera in 1997.

Her other stage work encompassed a wide range of productions. She was cast as Mary in Noa Ain's jazz opera Trio, which premiered at the American Music Theatre Festival in Philadelphia in July 1984 and was reprised at Carnegie Hall the following October. That same month she performed at the Centenary Gala celebrating the 100th anniversary of Jerome Kern's birth at The Town Hall. In 1985–1986 she starred in a 22-week run of Joan Micklin Silver and Julianne Boyd's A... My Name Is Alice at the Alley Theatre in Houston, a production that 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, and Sister Robert Anne in Dan Goggin's Nunsense at the Roxy Theatre in Atlanta in 1988. Regional theatre credits included Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!, Katisha in The Mikado, Berenice Sadie Brown in The Member of the Wedding, Calpurnia in To Kill a Mockingbird, Mother Shaw in Regina Taylor's Crowns, Jeanette in The Full Monty, and multiple roles in Nunsense. In 2003 she starred in Andy Razaf's Tan Manhattan at the Chicago Humanities Festival at Northwestern University.

Burns also toured nationally for many years in the one-woman show Hi-Hat Hattie, written by Larry Parr, in which she portrayed fellow Wichitan Hattie McDaniel, the first Black entertainer to win an Academy Award. The show features 14 songs arranged by Gordon Twist, including "Amazing Grace," "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" from Show Boat, and "St. Louis Blues." Burns debuted the production at the Players Theater of Columbus, Ohio, in 1991 and subsequently performed it in multiple cities, including off-Broadway in New York and the Florida Studio Theater in Sarasota, Florida. She performed the show in 2006 in honor of the issuance of a Hattie McDaniel postage stamp and continued performing it as late as the spring of 2018 following a recovery from health issues. Karla Burns died on June 4, 2021.