Passing Strange

(Passing Strange at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway. Photo: Me)

Two of my good theater friends highly recommended Passing Strange on Broadway, a new musical by indie-rocker Stew and Heidi Rosenwald. Both of them saw it at the Public Theater last year, and before that it had been building buzz at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. On Friday, critics raved about the show's Broadway transfer in the New York papers. Not knowing all that much about the show except that it was new and "vibrant" - we always like the sound of that - I decided to take a chance and see it on Saturday night while in New York City.

The show bristles with the energy of its fantastic, charismatic performers, with attractive, fun songs that propel us through an almost entirely through composed evening of rock music. It charts the adventures of a character named Youth (Daniel Breaker) as he travels from a wealthy black community in Los Angeles to Amsterdam and Berlin in search of himself as an artist, and in search of "reality" and "meaning" in his supposedly empty world. He tosses off the comforts of his overly attentive mother for his high ideal of realness. His journey to reality involves lots of drugs and sex in Amsterdam and trying on various artistic skins that may or may not suit him in Berlin. Stew, singer/songwriter and leader of LA-based band The Negro Problem, leads off the show like a concert ("Hello everyone - it's Saturday night!!"), then narrates the show from a mic at center stage, surrounded by an onstage band. Five actors play multiple roles around Youth, and the very active staging wanders, climbs and jumps around the minimal set. The backdrop is a white curtain until Youth leaves for Europe, when the curtain drops away to reveal a giant wall of colored fluorescent lights that flash and pulse to the beat of Youth's new life.

I found the show a bit hard to get into at first. Youth doesn't start off as a particularly likable character in the way that he smugly tosses off the loving attention of his mother and friends in search of a high minded vision of reality. It took me awhile to figure out why I should care about his artistic soul search.

After awhile, though - around the time the staging got clever and appealing - I could see it as a very honest representation of the find-your-way-in-the-world journey that everyone takes at some point or another. (It sort of made me uncomfortable - perhaps in a good way? - in light of my day's events. All day I'd been thinking about the interview I did that morning, turning it over and over in my head, thinking about the stuff and viewpoints that I spouted out, things I know I believe in but still scratch my head about when I hear myself actually saying them aloud. Do I sound like the Youth character on stage, yabbering to his mother his eagerly adopted new, "real" views of the world, when in actuality he is just stumbling around trying to find himself? Hopefully not, but yikes, there was far too much thinking going in seat C9 at the Belasco Theater on Saturday night.) So there was relevance to the subject matter.

(Photo: Carol Rosegg)

The show is appealing because of the music and performances. Stew's score makes for a true rock-and-roll song cycle of a show. As Stew points out himself in this NPR interview, it's not filtered musical theater rock, but the kind of rock that you'd hear on the radio or at a concert. Story is told in bits and pieces of spoken scenes and text between songs, and the songs either meditate on a particular theme or tell story much the way Billy Joel or Bob Dylan narrate a story in their songs. The sound is attractive and tuneful, the lyrics insightful and entertaining, so the show draws you in that way. (Four songs can be downloaded on the show's Web site.)

Then there is the fantastic cast. Daniel Breaker plays Youth with endearing compassion so that he never becomes completely unlikable, despite the character's smug attitude. Four ensemble actors play a multitude of very different roles, each with compelling, entertaining characterizations. I especially liked De'Adre Azziza's many characters, though Chad Goodridge, Colman Domingo and Rebecca Naomi Jones were no slouches either. Stew himself performs his hear and sweat out, and for fans familiar with him, he is certainly the foundation of the show with his constant presence on stage.

It'd be great if this show caught on. It's very good in its own way, and I totally get why it was successful at the non-profit, limited run and smaller capacity theaters like Berkeley Rep and the Public. However, I'm not sure if it has the mass appeal to sustain a commercial run on the more general interest-oriented Broadway. At the show I attended, they closed off the balcony, presumably from poor sales, and the entire orchestra section wasn't even full - and this on a Saturday night, which is usually the biggest night of the week. Reported grosses from the League of American Theaters & Producers are not strong either (only $81,470 in sales, 23.5% of capacity last week... yikes). It appears the producers are hoping for the effect of Spring Awakening, a rock musical with a similar young-audience appeal that weathered a slowish start to become a huge Tony-winning hit. But with Spring Awakening, there's a young cast and a story even more directly relevant to young angst than Passing Strange's young "artistic" angst. Time will tell how Passing Strange will do, but it's certainly something fresh and different on Broadway.

At the Belasco Theatre, New York City. www.passingstrangeonbroadway.com