Some people just know who they are and get on with life. The rest of us flail and ape and bend out of shape as we try to work out who we really are and what gang best befits us. The glory of Passing Strange — a Broadway import self-styled enough to have taken 16 years to reach London — is that it is a vivid tale of a young man’s search for authenticity that knows authenticity is both liberation and bunkum. Pitched between rock gig and musical, memoir and performance art, it’s musical theatre that even those who don’t like musical theatre can love. It’s satirical, stirring, tuneful, tender, awkward, alive.
It’s alive even though Stew, the single-named singer-songwriter who played himself in the original, is now played by Giles Terera. Handily, Terera (Aaron Burr in Hamilton) is an exceptional actor and singer who unfussily owns the role. Dressed in boiler suit and bolero hat, fitfully picking at a guitar, he is the show’s still centre. Around him revolve a smoking onstage rock band and an excellent cast (four of whom swap roles, plus Keenan Munn-Francis as young Stew and Rachel Adedeji as his mother).
It’s a clear-headed but forgiving story. In the second half, when Stew finds seeming sexual and artistic nirvana in Berlin, he will exploit his blackness, make out he comes from “the projects”. His German girlfriend will accuse him of “passing for ‘ghetto’”. We know she’s right: from line one this is a middle-class story, in which Stew wants to transcend the straitened respectability he sees in his mum.
“Normal, everyday things are phoney,” he declares, every teenager incarnate, seeking what’s real in late-Seventies Los Angeles through punk rock and drugs. He sees himself in earlier black dissidents such as James Baldwin. He hightails it to Europe to find himself. His mother would rather he found a job.
Stew’s details are his own, as a would-be girlfriend in the church choir rejects him for not being black enough, as he defends his new priorities with tunnel-visioned petulance. It could all be an indulgence. Yet the melodic music, by Stew and Heidi Rodewald, is sometimes psychedelic, always interesting as they pass from blues to gospel, from punk to funk to electro to chord-stacked showtunery.
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It helps to ensure this rite-of-passage story ends up both idiosyncratic and universal. The world wasn’t obsessing about identity politics like it does now when Passing Strange arrived (pre-Broadway) in 2007. Yet the show taps into the need to find new orthodoxies to shelter in as you set yourself free. It understands and mocks the need to be “real”.
Big ideas, but Liesl Tommy’s virtuosic production makes it all flow with a ragged ease. The band bring enough heat to summon up young Stew’s epiphanies. Older Stew artfully punctures them. I’ve never seen anything quite like Passing Strange. I’d happily see it again tomorrow.
★★★★☆
Young Vic, London SE1
For tickets, visit thetimes.co.uk/tickets
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