Aida Valdez and Rhys Berggruen perform a staged musical excerpt about forbidden love and impossible choices. She tells her lover he cannot call off his wedding because it would ruin her father's escape plan. The piece circles back to one question: is their fate written in the stars?
On Broadway in 2000, ran for 1,852 performances, and then closed in 2004. "Ritual in the Star" shows Aida, played by Aida Valdez, telling Romanyz, played by Rhys Berggruen, that they can never meet again. Romanyz is set to marry another, but has been seeing Aida in secret. He informs Aida that he will be calling off his wedding. Aida, knowing that this could jeopardize her father's chance at escape, is not a fan of this idea, and therefore the conflict ensues.
Now presenting "Richmond in the Stars" from IU.
Isn't it a world to an end? A lifetime of not knowing where, how, why, or when.
You think of me and speak of me, and one wonders there that someone you once loved is loving them so well. To ask. I need not lie.
Every moment of my life, from now until I die, I will think and dream of you and fail to understand how a perfect love can be confounded.
Is it written in stars?
Are we paying for some crime? Is that all that we are good for? To some stretch of mortal time or some chaos experiment in which we have no say, in which we're given paradise but only for a day. There is a princess, Radames.
You can help my people.
This is our chance to do something important. Can't you see that?
Nothing can be altered.
There is nothing to decide.
No change of heart, no place to hide.
Oh, you are all I ever want, but this I am denied. Sometimes in my darkest thoughts, I wish I'd never learned what it is to be in love and how bad love returns.
Is it written in the stars?
Are we paying for some crime?
Is that all that we are
