Setting the Scene

As Youth, the protagonist of Passing Strange, embarks on a journey to Europe, each city establishes a different point in his life and education. He adapts to his new surroundings, from sunny Los Angeles to artsy Amsterdam to radical Berlin, each time transforming into a new persona.

To distinguish these three major cities, set designer Giorgos Tsappas has created one basic set that transforms into three distinctive sets, each presenting a different city--Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Berlin--as a concept through a “passage of panels”. This basic set consists of a series of movable panels of steel and “Polygal” [a popular manufacturer of plastic sheets] hanging on the upstage wall, each then altered to create a distinct city setting and mood.

For Los Angeles, Tsappas uses “dimensional Polygal panels” so that “everything is linear and flat.” His design makes the church an aggravator but also a stimulant for Youth, who “yearns to escape, and discover Europe.” The flat set reinforces Youth’s unhappiness with his dull existence and sets up the urge to go somewhere completely different. At the end of the play, he returns to his dull life for his mother’s funeral, but with more maturity and optimism for the future. Four vertical florescent lights are incorporated into the design to set up the funeral scene.

To create Amsterdam, Tsappas uses “an exposed window, colorful chairs and flashing colors.” This is Youth’s first experience of “a European city away from the flat surfaces of L.A.” As Youth goes on to discover the art scene in Amsterdam, Tsappas’s design conveys the vivacity of a musician’s life in an explosive, vibrant and dynamic Europe; a sharp contrast to boring and monotonous L.A.

Next, Youth’s trip to Berlin continues his journey to discovering “the Real.” In stark contrast to Amsterdam, Tsappas’s “tilted panels and exposed raw metal” make the set “all about hard angles and shadows.” Instead of vibrant colors, “the pallet is monochromatic” with “black/white and silver” to challenge Youth. Although different from L.A. and Amsterdam, Berlin poses its own “set” of obstacles in Youth’s quest to find “the Real.” Reinforcing the message that the new city --and to a greater extend, the journey of life—is not safe and agreeable. 

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The Washington Post

'Passing Strange' at Studio 2ndStage:
A tasty musical treat, even without Stew

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 20, 2010

In the recipe for a melodically charged serving of "Passing Strange," you can, it seems, leave out the Stew.

The rocking songwriter known professionally by that single moniker was the chief ingredient in the strong critical response to this autobiographical musical, which had a modest 165-performance run on Broadway in 2008. As the show's star, lyricist, author of its Tony-winning book and co-composer of the music with Heidi Rodewald, Stew seemed a veritable one-man band, even though he was surrounded by a cadre of other musicians and actors.

Now, Studio Theatre's 2ndStage has taken Stew's voluble personality out of the mix, handing over the duties of the evening's touchstone narrator to Jahi A. Kearse. If anything, the casting change affirms that "Passing Strange" can stand without the shimmer of Stew's aura. What appeared to have been a piece tailored to a singular talent proves with this rousing production to be a broader musical statement, about the tension between an artist's egocentric mission and a man's duty to the people he loves.

Stylistically, "Passing Strange" tries to push the boundaries of musical theater -- it's as much a concert as a play -- but the story itself is surprisingly conventional: a portrait of an artist attempting to break free of his roots, only to discover he can't move on without a reconciliation with his past. This struggle is a bit cliched as a musical subject; its familiarity diminishes the show's adventurous luster. Yet there is a wry crispness to Stew's musings about a young black man finding his voice (and inflating the scope of the challenges of his bourgeois life), and an infectious appeal to the eclectic palette of songs through which the tale vividly speaks.

The musical charts the progress of a character called Youth (Aaron Reeder), from a restless adolescence in south-central Los Angeles to a wing-spreading young adulthood in Europe, among free-love types in Amsterdam and snarling avant-gardists in Berlin. Kearse's omniscient narrator, it turns out, is the older incarnation of this young man, whose unfocused creative energies cry out to be tempered by experience and a more forgiving nature.

It's apparent in director Keith Alan Baker's clarifying production that "Passing Strange" apportions juicy roles to many of the supporting players. Baker has more than doubled the ensemble, to 15 from the original seven. Enhanced by Helanius J. Wilkins's buoyant choreography, songs such as "Welcome to Amsterdam" and "May Day" now unfold like bona fide production numbers. The actors playing a variety of incidental characters make lovely impressions, among them Eric R. Williams as a rhythmically challenged drummer in a garage band; Jessica Frances Dukes, playing a Dutch devotee of sex and drugs; and the divine Deborah Lubega, in a turn as a Berlin revolutionary running a collective of artistic anarchists. Costume designer Kristopher Castle's clever get-ups give the Germans the look of a glam-punk motorcycle gang.

The production satisfies an admirable goal of the 2ndStage program: showcasing emerging performers. In this case, some are so fresh that they've yet to earn their union cards. (Virtually all of the actors are African American, and the ensemble's depth is a reminder that even at this late date, it's a talent pool that remains undertapped in these parts.) Baker has guided them all with the same level of technical command he brought two summers ago to a musical with another set of complex working parts, "Jerry Springer: The Opera."

From that offering, he has gratifyingly moved up the ranks one of the standout ensemble members, Reeder, who here plays to sterling effect the central role. Stew is no rose-petal memoirist; he looks back with a healthy appreciation of hypocrisy. In the scathing second-act number, "The Black One," Reeder expertly details Stew's cynical survey of images of black men in the popular imagination. But Stew comes down hardest on the young man in question, who in pursuing an artistic identity distances himself to a needlessly callous degree from his devoted mother (Deidra LaWan Starnes). As she points out to him in a transatlantic phone call, "Your deep concern for yourself is really moving."

The musical -- staged in Studio's raw upstairs space on Giorgos Tsappas's simple set of a benchlike platform, with Christopher Youstra leading a terrific four-piece band -- feels on some level like an attempt to expose this painful error of youth. A wonderful observation is made late in the evening, about how terrifying it is to consider that the course of one's life is based on the decisions of a teenager.

It's Kearse, as the present-day incarnation of that Youth, who delivers this wisdom, one of many wise moments in a moving, cannily controlled performance. If Stew tended to spin across the evening like a strengthening twister, Kearse offers more measured meteorological force. This alters the atmosphere of "Passing Strange" just enough to let us fully enjoy a wider range of Stew's vivacious landscape.

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