This is a brilliant tour-de-force musical theater production, at once deceptively simple in the coming-of-age storyline yet highly complex and nuanced in its integrations of music, theater and cinema, performance art and dance-movement, literature, and poetry. It's vastly funny. It overturns concepts of 'theater' or 'musical' and creates a whole new performance style - as far as these terms might denote. It's hip. It's cool. It's beyond urban. It's very sleek. Notice those startling purple and gold theater bill posters plastered all over New York City with the skewed perspectives' graphic lettering? It's a great head trip that twists and angles as it entertains...but you can read it in a subliminal way - clearly.

The narrator-musician, co-composer, co-orchestrator, Stew, is a real-life black rocker who actually has a band called The Negro Problem. He created Passing Strange along with composer-musician-orchestrator Heidi Rodewald in collaboration with director and co-creator Annie Dorsen. This is his story, presumably autobiographical, viewed and performed with degrees of detachment and wryness, consternation and nostalgia, regret and ultimately - home-grown wisdom. This is above all, an American creative triumph through the perspective of the Black American experience. It rocks.



To venture into the lands of theater and musicals is hazardous. There are ghostly figures in histories. Stew meets up with some forebears with style, wit and erudition without being boring. Like a DJ at the mixing board with a strong background in the histories of music, literature and theater, he deftly throws down references, calls to mind, and alludes to - slyly or overtly - Homer, Shakespeare, Lawrence Sterne, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Voltaire, James Joyce, James Baldwin, Jean-Luc Godard, Spike Lee, Ma Rainey, Mahalia Jackson, James Brown, Elvis, the Beatles, Lerner and Lowe, Josephine Baker, and maybe even Elizabeth Streb. Maybe interestingly, Stew seems to re-create anew "The Invisible Man" in his own version-story of the Youth - acted by the beguiling, talented Daniel Breaker - in search of his identity in black America and the rest of the world.

This is, above all, a musical that unfolds to become a universal classic. The story begins with the Youth as an adolescent in '70's central Los Angeles, faced with a mother who attempts vainly to steer the course of his life by urging his attendance in church towards piousness - and away from his Buddhist musings. The Youth is struck by an epiphany, discovering the roots of rock in church gospel, all heightened by the experience of smoking pot and hanging out with funky, mixed-bag church pals including the swishy pastor's son. He becomes a punk rocker and creates with his band one of the best punk rock acts ever, although this musical foray is doomed in the play as a mere juvenile flirtation.

He leaves home on picaresque journeys to grow up abroad through "foreign-land" set parodies of intellectual bohemian life in Paris via Godard, Amsterdam's hash cafes, and Berlin's anarchic, radical chic, all the while in search of the 'Real.' As he returns home for his mother's funeral - too late to express his love for her while alive and confounded earlier by the motherly importuning to return home, he discovers that home-is-where-the-heart-is. The Real turns out to be all about this foundational love. The once callow Youth through regret, guilt and pain, now sadly liberated from his earthly attachment to his mother, transcends his loss and becomes a singer-poet-philosopher.

Were he alive, the late great Nigerian musician, Fela, would hoot with delight if he could experience Passing Strange. There are many parallels between the lives of the Youth and Fela's own. Fela's musical experiences and influences in LA, Amsterdam and Berlin were reflected in his music. Also, the frustration, anger and rebellion that characterized his life vector with the perspectives of Stew's. Just as Stew re-appropriates white rock with black vernacular roots, so did Fela re-appropriate jazz and rock to create his Afrobeat style. However, the American brand of humor and comedy in Stew's musical were not a part of Fela's outraged cynicism with post-Colonial Africa.

Fela would have been fascinated by the superb character portrayals, as the Youth's adolescent friends morph chameleon-like into the various European personae, indeed 'passing strange' as if drug-induced hallucinations over the course of the enacted story. He would most certainly give thumbs-up to the live performance aspect as entertainment, the riveting immediacy - of which he was a master impresario. He would have flipped over the music. He would have studied closely the ingenious lighting and sound designs and structures. He might even have appropriated many of the theatrical ideas and innovations to create a whole new African musical, spliced with Nigeria's magnificent ritual theater traditions. Above all, Fela would probably have liked to attend this musical several times to marvel over all the production values and find comparisons with his own life's experiences - and to be rocked.

Passing Strange
Playing at the Belasco Theater
111 West 44th Street (Between Broadway and 6th Avenue)
New York NY 10036