Sunday Showtunes

I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen the streets of Manhattan between 8 and 10 pm (show times)!   I’ve only seen them before and after the shows.  I rather imagined they would be empty, everyone being at one of the 39 shows.  Sure enough, although there were plenty of people on this Friday night, the crowds were light (fortunately, as I was in a hurry and every minute lost was one less minute of my $120 show I was missing!).  After the show the sidewalks were at their usual massive levels of people slowly trying to surge along.

The show I missed almost half of was “Passing Strange,” a new rock musical that had its beginnings at the Public Theatre and then Berkeley Rep.   I didn’t see it at the Rep and am somewhat disgusted with myself that I had to go to New York to see it (well, sort of see it).  I also didn’t know much about it, mostly on purpose because I wanted to see something “fresh” for once, but I had the idea it was avant-garde and something about a young man experimenting with the world and trying to find himself.   I knew it was written by the singer/songwriter known as Stew (I’d like to see him on a double bill with Meat Loaf – “Meat Loaf and Stew”) and somehow I thought it was mostly a blues/rock score.  I like blues to a degree but not in large doses, and I must admit even though I had purchased a ticket, I was looking forward to “Passing Strange” the LEAST of any show this trip.

Well, since it IS avant-garde – abstract even, something of a cross between a concert and performance art – with almost no set, and I had joined it in the middle of a song 18 minutes before the end of the first act, I literally had no idea what was going on!   I could not discern or pick up on the plot, who was who, or what was happening.  However by the end of the number I had joined in progress, I was in love with the music and totally digging the show!   I cannot wait to get the cast album.  At intermission, I did have to ask the man next to me (who had also seen it at the Public) what it was about, and even he wasn’t too sure but he gave me a lot of good information to catch me up.  

The show is kind of an amalgam of all the most popular rock musicals – “Hair,” “The Who’s Tommy,” “Rent,” “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and “Spring Awakening” in particular.   The musical style is rock, often sounding like “classic rock” from the 60’s and 70’s (including occasional similarities to “Hair”) and at times reminding one of the other aforementioned musicals.  It’s often presentational and concert-style like “Hedwig” and occasionally has the same vibe – and it is also “rock concert” loud like “Hedwig” was.  In fact, my intermission seat mate was a white-haired man in his 60’s at least, just like the guy that sat next to me at “Hedwig” – I was worried about someone of his generation at an extremely loud and sometimes profane show like this.  But, just like the guy at “Hedwig,” he loved it!   You go, old men!  That’s what I get for making generational assumptions.  When I am 65 I definitely am STILL going to be rocking out to “Rent” and whatever!

Speaking of “Rent,” “Passing Strange” is presented somewhat abstractly through creative staging and lighting like “Rent” is, on an abstract set like “Spring Awakening.”  In fact, the set is just a back wall of various-length and different colored horizontal and vertical neon straight lines, and round lights in different colors and patterns.  This wall-of-light is designed by the same guy that designed the similar (though less extensive) lighting for “Spring Awakening.”  The rest of the set is a bare stage wooden floor with a few chairs, and a stool and microphone stand where Stew (playing a narrator) performs.  The only other feature are four square holes in the stage (DSC, USC, SR, and SL, or “North South East and West” for you non-theatre types) that each contain one of the 4 band members (drums, bass, keyboard/guitar and guitar/keyboard).  The four holes are actually platforms that hydraulically sink to create the holes; most of the time the player is “sunk” and we see them sticking up in the stage floor from the elbows up, visible along with their instruments at all times.  I have never seen a set in any show that features the musicians as part of the FLOOR on-stage.   The performers are blocked around them and occasionally incorporate them into the show (touching them, referencing them).   As a musician I found them a bit distracting (I always want to watch them work, and one of them looked so much like Paul Shaffer I began to wonder if he moonlighted from “The Late Show”) but their playing was so amazingly rocking that I didn’t care.  It’s not like I was following the plot of the show anyway!

The title has multiple meanings, culled from such sources as Shakespeare, literature and poetry, science articles, and black culture.  For the most part it means “stranger than strange” or “very strange,” going “beyond” strange. It’s also used as a symbolic double meaning for “passing” (as in passing for white, or rich people “passing” for poor, which the main character, referred to only with the symbolic moniker “Youth,” does in order to seem more “hood”).

The performances are all amazing.  A lot of the folks are making their Broadway debuts, though many of them have been with the project since its origin.  However unlike “Grease,” in which the fact that most of the cast were neophytes showed in the quality of the acting, you would never have guessed that most of the “Passing Strange” cast were making their debuts.  They were wonderful and gave 110% energetic and full-out performances (as opposed to the disappointing “just another Tuesday night” performances I had witnessed at “Spring Awakening.”)  The only flaw I could find it it was I felt the drums were a bit unbalanced in the sound design.

Even though I’d had a long and tiring travel day full of problems, and had only gotten 4 hours of sleep the night before (and I couldn’t sleep on the plane), I left “Passing Strange” feeling totally energetic and buzzed.  Clutching my signed-by-the-cast window card (purchased to benefit BC/EFA; all the shows are doing their BC/EFA fund-raising pitches this week), I headed to the hotel to unpack, disinfect the room, and get started on this little tome.

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