Karla Burns, music theater trailblazer who won coveted Olivier award, dies at 66
Karla Burns, a Wichita-born Tony-nominated singer and actress who was the first Black person to win Britain’s most prestigious theater award, died overnight at a local hospital following a prolonged illness. She was 66.
Burns’ longtime friend and the artistic director of Roxy’s Downtown, where she made her final appearance on stage in February 2020, as Evilene in “The Wiz,” confirmed the death Friday morning but did not give a cause other than saying she had been in poor health for about six months.
Rick Bumgardner said Burns “passed peacefully at St. Francis Hospital surrounded by lifelong friends,” including several from the local music and theater community and one she’d known since kindergarten. She died at 12:58 a.m. Friday, he said.
Burns, who grew up and lived in Wichita, rose to international acclaim for her powerful vocal music and theater performances, which included shows at venues, theater stages and opera houses around the world.
“She was a local, Wichita home-grown girl who made it big,” Bumgardner told The Eagle in a phone interview Friday.
Among her most notable appearances were with the Paris Opera, with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, as Lily in George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House and in Noa Ain’s “Trio” at Carnegie Hall, according to her Wikipedia page.
She also portrayed Queenie in a revival of Jerome Kern’s musical “Show Boat” — a performance that won her Britain’s coveted Laurence Olivier Award in 1991 after the show moved from Broadway to the London stage.
She was the first Black performer ever, African-American or otherwise, to win the prize.
“Karla was a trailblazer. She did things she shouldn’t do,” Bumgardner said. “... She overcame so many obstacles in her lifetime.”
Burns was born on Christmas Eve in 1954 to Willie Lee and Catherine Burns. In an episode of “It’s All Good with Sierra Scott,” she credited her father, a jazz and gospel pianist, and her mother for inspiring her love of singing and music.
“Every Saturday night we would sit around the piano ... and we would get ready for church on Sunday morning,” she said at the time.
Her father died when she was 7. But his affection for song stayed with her, fueling her musical dreams, her friends said.
Her mother further set her up for success by telling her to “reach out and grab for” whatever opportunities presented themselves, Burns said in the episode.
“That’s what I had the goal to do, to sing,” Burns said, adding that as a young child she would walk around the block in her neighborhood belting out lyrics to anyone who listened. “And I don’t care where it is.”
Throughout her life, her goal to sing shifted only briefly. When she was a student at Wichita West High School, she decided she wanted to major in math.
But a teacher there, she said, steered her back toward music, telling her that she “could really sing.”
Despite earning scholarships to colleges outside of her hometown, Burns chose to attend Wichita State University. Her logic was simple: “Why would you go away when you have the opportunity to study with some fabulous people right here?”
But navigating through her education goals was far less easy. At the time she attended WSU, the school’s vocal music and theater programs were in different departments. She wanted degrees in both — something that had not been done before — but she was seen as something of an outsider in each area.
“In the music department I was considered as an actor. In the theater department, I was considered as a singer,” Burns said in 2012.
“So they asked me to do a little of both in each one of those places. But I was never what I was where I was.”
At one point, a vocal music professor told her she would never sing for a career and that she shouldn’t even try.
The harsh criticism left her sobbing on a bench in Duerksen Fine Arts Center.
That’s where George Gibson, who would go on to coach her voice and nudge her into a professional performance career, found her.
In a Friday morning phone interview after he’d been notified of Burns’ death, he told The Eagle when he asked what was wrong, she told him a faculty member told her to quit music and “go into some other field.”
He said he knew from the get-go that Burns was “multi-talented” — he’d heard about her singing ability while she was still in high school — but said she was “a little unfocused.”
“I brought her into my studio and we had a heart-to-heart talk,” he said, recalling the encounter. After that, he agreed to take her on as a student if she was willing to follow his coaching.
Over the years, he said, Burns “began to improve immensely, and I realized that this is a real talent that comes along rarely.” He served as professor of voice and director of opera for WSU’s College of Fine Arts for 29 years, until his retirement in 1997.
“Once I realized that she was primed for making an international career, I encouraged her very, very, strongly,” he said.
“She was just a remarkable individual.”
After Burns graduated from WSU, her career took off. In addition to the 1991 Olivier award, she also received a Tony Award nomination for featured actress in a musical for her portrayal of Queenie during the 1982-83 season of “Show Boat.” She went on to appear in a number of other productions including William Shakespeare plays like “Comedy of Errors” and regional theater productions of “South Pacific,” “Hello Dolly,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “Nunsense.” She also starred in a Larry Parr’s one-woman show, “Hi-Hat Hattie,” detailing the life of another Wichita-born Black actress, Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to win an Oscar, for her role as Mammy in the 1939 movie “Gone with the Wind.”
Most recently, she was recognized by Roxy’s Downtown as spotlight artist for the month of June “for her incredible contribution to the arts community in Wichita, the region, nation and beyond,” according to the Wichita-based venue’s website. She holds numerous other honors including the 2000 Kansas African American Museum Trailblazer Award, and she was inducted in the WSU Fine Arts Hall of Fame in 2016.
Despite the hard-won successes, a number of health struggles punctuated Burns’ musical career. Perhaps the worst scare came in 2007, when she discovered she had a nine-pound, 10-ounce goiter in her neck that required surgery to remove.
After the procedure, she could barely speak. The doctors told her she would probably never sing again.
Determined, she proved them wrong. She went on to perform several more times after the surgery including singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at a Wichita City Council meeting and coach her own students.
“She was just an angel that was sent down here to try to help people,” said Tom Frye, a longtime friend who was involved with Burns in around 35 productions.
“She just gave joy to the world. And we were lucky enough to have her close by.”
This story was originally published June 4, 2021 at 1:12 PM.
