Review: Stew’s ‘Passing Strange’ on Broadway
By Linda Winer, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.
Feb. 29–Let’s not get too distracted figuring out how to categorize “Passing Strange,” the stranger-in-a-strange-land original passing for a Broadway musical at the Belasco Theatre.
What’s important is that the thing — part indie-rock concert, part boho-art project, part coming-of-age black-identity crisis, part hipster travelogue — is all smart and all enjoyable and all very good for the theater.
The show, a hit at the Public Theater last spring, is what its author-composer-narrator calls “autobiographical fiction.” That fellow, a big bald man named Stew, runs the proceedings onstage with a bemused attitude, old-soul eyes and dark-rimmed eyeglasses which, when he balances them on his forehead, give him the quizzical look of a cartoon frog.
He co-wrote the piece with Heidi Rodewald, who plays bass from one of four musician pods that ingeniously descend into tiny makeshift pits around the action. Six terrific emotional chameleons — including Daniel Breaker as the prodigal son called Youth — play mercilessly with stereotypes until it’s hard not to agree with his church-choir mentor who, early in the journey, says, “I mean, baby, we’re all freaks depending on the backdrop.”
Stew (born 46 years ago in Los Angeles as Mark Stewart) used to have a pop-rock band called the Negro Problem. In other words, he takes no prisoners in his search for middle-class black identity in a hip-hop marketplace. When we first meet the supportive Mother (Eisa Davis), she is waking up her son for church with “Lawd ham mercy, chile….” Our Narrator stops the flashback to tell us, “She drops the Negro dialect and speaks in her natural voice.”
And so we’ve been warned. This portrait-of-an-artist story — oh, did I mention there’s a story? — is going to trick the myths on his journey from naive young American youth to expatriate adventures in Amsterdam and Berlin in the ’80s.
Along the way, there will be a sly detour into musical-theater expectations, winks of bad poetry about “brother Al Camus and little Jimmy Baldwin,” a post-coital Dutch rumba, an altogether unexpected little satire about avant-garde European cinema and an art-rock German performance piece (for the outlandishly gifted Colman Domingo) that growls, “What’s inside is just a lie/There is only surface.”
But what’s inside is what gives this surface its remarkable traction. Annie Dorsen, a downtown director in her mainstream debut, keeps the seriously comic action — to use Stew’s favorite word — real. With little more than a few chairs and a back wall (by David Korins) of jukebox neon lights, the show manages to create at least three different communities of unpredictable individuals with complex internal lives and worldviews.
Karole Armitage, a veteran modern-dance choreographer, gives raucous energy to purposefully haphazard running, sliding and spinning for joy. No Broadway unisons here. The costumes, by Elizabeth Hope Clancy, understand the different functions of a mother’s shirtwaist dress and a rebel’s leather pants.
Just when the self-searching examinations threaten to get pretentious, this good-natured show slaps them back to earth. When Youth tries to impress his German friends with his ghetto-warrior “Identity Song,” the thing turns out to be a vaudeville.
If “Passing Strange” has a relative in pop-mainstream theater, it isn’t “Rent” or even “Spring Awakening.” With its unconventional structure, it’s more like “Hair” — you remember, the “tribal love-rock musical.” Nobody gets naked here, but everyone is exposed.
PASSING STRANGE. Book and lyrics by Stew, music by Stew and Heidi Rodewald, directed by Annie Dorsen at the Belasco Theatre, 111 W. 44th St., Manhattan. Tickets $26.50-$111.50; 212-239-6200. Seen at Sunday afternoon preview.
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