‘Star Trek’s’ George Takei coming to Utah to narrate a musical work based on his life

The work, debuting at Moab Music Festival, is inspired by the actor’s childhood in an internment camp.

Movie and TV icon George Takei will come to Moab on Labor Day weekend, to narrate the world premiere of a chamber-music work inspired by his experience in Japanese American internment camps during World War II.

The work, “Lost Freedom: A Memory” by composer Kenji Bunch, will debut Saturday, Sept. 4, at the Red Cliffs Lodge in Moab, as part of the Moab Music Festival, the festival announced Wednesday.

The festival, in a statement, said it commissioned Bunch to write the work based on the “Star Trek” star’s speeches, personal writings and recollections, which were compiled by the festival’s music director, Michael Barrett. The work is the first to be produced as part of the festival’s new Commissioning Club.

Takei, 84, was just two months shy of his fifth birthday on Feb. 19, 1942, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering the forced removal of some 120,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the west coast. Those citizens were relocated to camps away from the coasts. (One of them was Topaz, near Delta, Utah.)

Takei’s family was forced to leave their home in Los Angeles to live in a “relocation center” in Arkansas and two sites in California during World War II. The text for “Lost Freedom” is based on Takei’s impressions of that time and of his family’s struggles returning to Los Angeles after the war.

In its release, the festival noted that Moab played a part in that tragic history. The Dalton Wells camp, originally created by the Civilian Conservation Corps about 13 miles north of Moab, was used as an “isolation camp,” where so-called “troublemakers” from other internment camps were sent.

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