Although Weill adapted some of the music from his 1929 musical Happy End, his score for Marie Galante shows none of the mordant quality of his Berlin works -- his songs seem as French as if he had been born there. At least four of the songs are superb examples of pure Parisian cabaret melodies and one, "J'attends un navire" ("I Wait for a Ship") about Marie's hopes that one day a ship will come to take her back to Bordeaux, is so nostalgic that it later became one of the theme songs of the French Résistance during World War II.

After two years in Paris, Weill emigrated to the United States in 1935, where he quickly connected with many of New York's theater people, including Moss Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, S.J. Perlman, Ogden Nash, Elmer Rice, Langston Hughes, Alan Jay Lerner and Weill's most frequent collaborator, playwright Maxwell Anderson. His contacts enabled him to establish a successful career as a Broadway composer, adapting his talent for bittersweet melody (by now more sweet than bitter) to a series of musicals, including Johnny Johnson, Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, Street Scene, Down in the Valley, Love Life and Lost in the Stars. Weill brought to Broadway a gift for instrumentation -- he was the first composer to write his own orchestral scores since Victor Herbert -- and a highly developed sense of musical character and theatrical form.

In 1947, Maxwell Anderson and Weill read the recently-published novel Cry the Beloved Country by South African writer Alan Paton, which expressed the kind of theme about brotherhood they were looking for in a musical drama. Calling it a "musical tragedy" to distinguish it from a "musical comedy," Weill composed Lost in the Stars between March and September 1949, adapting some of the music from a 1939 uncompleted play by Anderson called Ulysses Africanus, and it opened at Broadway's Music Box Theater on October 30, directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Weill and Anderson originally intended the lead role for singer Paul Robson, but by 1949 Robson's politics had become so controversial that they eventually settled on Todd Duncan, who played the original Porgy in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.

Lost in the Stars takes place in South Africa. A black preacher, the Reverend Stephen Kumalo, searches for his son Absalom, who left for Johannesburg to earn money for his education. In the course of his search, Reverend Kumalo finds that Absalom has fallen into bad company, become involved in a burglary and has been arrested for the murder of Arthur Jarvis, a lawyer and crusader for the freedom of black people who is the son of James Jarvis, a wealthy white planter. The climax of the story details Absalom's repentance and his refusal to perjure himself, his unfair trial and execution, and the final understanding reached between Reverend Kumalo and the elder Jarvis.

Lost in the Stars, despite its subject, makes very little use either of African music or African-American jazz, Weill preferring to create a work with a sound all its own. The opening number of Lost in the Stars, "The Hills of Ixopo" quotes directly from the opening chapter of the novel, describing the green hills and desolate valleys of South Africa. As the Reverend Kumalo leaves for the city, the chorus provides the rhythm of the train wheels in "Train to Johannesburg." "Who'll Buy My Juicy Rutabagas?" is sung by Linda, a singer in a Shantytown dive where Absolom hangs out (as one commentator points out, "the song is not about selling vegetables at all."). In the second act, Irina, Absolom's true love, sings "Stay Well," a beautiful soliloquy in which she agrees to marry him regardless of the verdict. As the Reverend makes his final visit to Absolom's cell to perform the marriage between his son and Irina before Absolom is executed, the music is framed by the chorus singing "Cry, the Beloved Country." The title song, "Lost in the Stars," closes the first act, after the Reverend has found his son in jail, accused of murder.

Lost in the Stars was Weill's last completed work. He and Anderson had begun working on a musical version of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn when he died in New York of heart failure on April 3, 1950.