The Rock Musical Comes of Age

"Passing Strange is a beautiful post-modern love song to my soul"
-GraightNYC's Lindsay

The idea of ‘The Real’ crops up all over the place in Passing Strange, an aptly ‘strange’ motif to stress in the most artificial of dramatic forms, the musical. This formal and aesthetic paradox, expressed plainly throughout the Public Theater’s bold production, ultimately becomes the backbone of this remarkable new show.

Passing Strange is the work of Heidi Rodewald and Stew (yes, that’s one name only), and tells the story of Stew’s coming of age as a young musician searching for his artistic identity in the avant-garde art scenes of Amsterdam and Berlin. Both Stew and Ms. Rodewald perform from onstage as part of a five piece band, with Stew himself serving as an almost Wilder-esque narrator, occasionally interacting with the characters and relaying much of the story to the audience in a series of recitative-like songs. These semi-sung monologues occasionally bleed into full-fledged songs, featuring lyrics that fall somewhere between Sondheim and slam poetry. Rock music—in this case a blend of blues, jazz, gospel, rock, etc.—has never felt so effortless or natural on stage.

Often Passing Strange has the feeling of an amazing concert with a phenomenal narrative, as when techies, cast, and band members chat during scene changes and applause breaks; think The Who’s Tommy…except emotionally and dramatically believable. At other times, Passing Strange becomes a marvelous pastiche, with sections skewering European Art House cinema, avant-garde performance art, and even a minstrel number, easily the funniest, most disturbing, and most daring number in the entire show; this is a study in the forms of artifice.

The show’s wit fails, though, when the actors start to sing, at which point Passing Strange becomes depressingly conventional. I do not doubt the vocal abilities of the supremely talented cast—the fault here does not lie with them but with the show itself. Passing Strange owes its success to being aware of the other ‘rock musicals’ out there without paying them much heed, that is to say it neither embraces nor rejects the conventions of the other rock musicals. When the protagonist touches down in Amsterdam and the characters begin to sing, Passing Strange suddenly becomes a silly, two-bit rehashing of Rent.

Fortunately, these moments of eye-rolling conventionality are fairly brief, mostly concentrated in the part of the show that takes place in Amsterdam, which features a song that I would swear sounds like a reprise of “Light my Candle” (as though we needed to hear that song again), as well as the obligatory explicit sex scene. In spite of these lapses in taste, judgement, or whatever you might call it, Passing Strange has moments of such clarity and incandescent energy, and a cast of such remarkable talent (Daniel Breaker as the Youth and Eisa Davis as the Mother in particular give stunning performances), as to make its weaker moments forgivable.

Passing Strange does not prove that there are new frontiers in musical theater so much as it proves that new kinds of theater remain for exploration, that a good play can feature good music…or is it the other way around? A show can be meta and still take itself seriously, can be ironic and still have meaning beyond irony itself, can break the fourth wall without winking and nudging, accomplished here by not acknowledging a fourth wall in the first place. In a time when theater, and particularly musical theater, only seems capable of wittily skewering itself while smothered by layers of self-awareness (or should we call it self-hatred?), Passing Strange has the guts to say something meaningful, and does so by suggesting that we might best seek out the ‘The Real’ in artifice itself. A post-modern love song indeed.

Passing Strange played for a limited engagement and closed earlier this month.