Book and Lyrics: Stew
Music: Stew Stewart and Heidi Rodewald
Director: Liesl Tommy
A coming-of-age story wrapped around some of the musical developments of the late twentieth century, Stew Stewart and Heidi Rodewald’s Passing Strange is light on plot and purpose but uses music to galvanise the audience as its central character explores life, art and meaning. Taking the Youth from a teenage Christian choir in LA to Amsterdam and a Berlin art collective, this unusually structured musical has a technical appeal that is very pleasing even if the story gets stuck on repeat.
The Youth lives with his Christian mother in 1970s LA and struggles to find a separate identity in the regular church programme and clean living she advocates. Starting his own punk bank in the 80s and desperate to find his place in the world, Youth flees to Europe where he experiences freedom for the first time, but as his older self looks back on this formative experience, was the music really enough?
Passing Strange, directed at the Young Vic by Liesl Tommy, has a concert energy and in Ben Stones’ small stage design, the band is given considerable prominence, a self-awareness about the nature of performance that adds layers to this biopic approach to storytelling through song. Sung by a Narrator – an older version of Youth – he shapes his own life story while also explaining much of the psychological insight and development affecting his young self.
It is an interesting idea and it mostly works as a concept, although this is a chaos to the practical connection between episodic plot points that stalls the action when the cast pauses to riff on particular sentiments or periods of Youth’s life. Some of that is central to the overall focus of Passing Strange including a recurring thought about the relationship with his mother and the Youth’s love for her which retains a hold over him even when he struggles to go home. Other sections are far more tangential such as the extended, but admittedly funny, punk cabaret in Berlin that is deliberately odd but feels like a digression.
Passing Strange is a lengthy show, running at close to three hours at the press performance, that sometimes lingers too long on scenarios that ultimately yield very little, or at least no more than they would given half the stage time. There are real moments of brilliance here and when Tommy embraces the rock concert elements of the staging with lighting design by Richard Howell and intensive vocal performance for big numbers like Are You Ready to Explode and It’s Alright, the production fizzes with energy, but the show always wants to be small again, drawing itself back into a philosophical poignancy about turning your life into a work of art that feels less impactful.
Passing Strange has a small but excellent cast led by Giles Terera who is a charismatic Narrator, reminding the audience of what a fine vocalist he is after starring in a series of plays, while Keenan Munn-Francis as Youth grows into the role as his character takes control of his own life, and the two leads nicely mirror each other’s performances. Renée Lamb, Nadia Violet Johnson, David Albury and Caleb Roberts provide great backup in a variety of comedy support roles that flesh out the changing locations of the story.
Often a strange show as its title suggests, the alternative approach to theatre-making is hugely enjoyable but despite its nod to the avant-garde, Passing Strange is ultimately a bit too sentimental to sustain its edge.
Runs until 6 July 2024
