
Timbuktu (Washington DC tryout, 1978)
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Robert Wright, George Forrest, and Luther Davis’s 'Timbuktu!' launched its monumentally anticipated world premiere out-of-town pre-Broadway tryout engagement at Washington D.C.’s historic Kennedy Center Opera House in early 1978, generating immediate box-office records before crossing to New York. Opulently re-engineering their own classic 1953 musical blueprint *Kismet* into a high-octane African folktale landscape set inside 14th-century Mali, the grand-scale pop opera featured an elite all-Black company directed and choreographed by Geoffrey Holder.

