Vibrant with a fearsome authority
Passing Strange The Opera House, Queen and Broadview, Toronto
In comparison to Canadian Stage’s Liv Stein, there’s another, far more vibrant piece about an aspiring young musician to be seen in Passing Strange. It’s a 10-year-old American musical brought to us by Acting Up Stage in collaboration with Obsidian. Its protagonist, identified as Youth, grows up in Los Angeles.
As a boy he’s into Zen and won’t go to church until his mother, identified as Mother, forces him into it. There he discovers music, of the intoxicating gospel kind, and also girls. And, slightly later, pot. He starts a terrible punk band. As a discontented adolescent, he relocates to Europe. First to Amsterdam, where he smokes and loves more extensively, and then to Berlin, where both the drugs and the women are harder.
The artist known as Stew wrote the book and lyrics, and collaborated on the music with Heidi Rosewald. He also appeared in the original production as the Narrator. In this one, his role and his name, are taken by Beau Dixon who handles them with fearsome authority, whether talking, singing or twanging guitar. He is especially on point when the show debunks its own, and other people’s, pretensions.
In Berlin, our Youth falls in with an artistic- anarchist collective calling itself the Now House. It’s very fierce, but i ts members still go home for Christmas. They pour scorn on his bourgeois songwriting but soften when he tells them, falsely, that he grew up in the slums of Los Angeles’s South Central. At which point the Narrator interrupts to say, definitively, “No one in this play has ever been to South Central.”
In the first act the show tells us that it doesn’t do show tunes. Then, in the second act, it comes up with a dandy one in which our hero acts out all the myths he would like his German friends to believe. This number is exuberantly choreographed by Kimberley Rampersad whose contribution to Philip Akin’s excellent production is a major aspect throughout.
Youth himself is a blank slate, but that’s the point, one t hat Jahlen Barnes’ performance socks across with great energy, artfully controlled. He and Dixon only falter when the show itself does. At its end, Passing Strange succumbs to the kind of portentousness seemingly unavoidable in rock musicals.
Our hearts our sentimentally assaulted by a relationship with Mother that simply hasn’t been established, though that’s hardly the fault of Divine Brown who can be soulful or acerbic as required. A string of supporting male cameos are handled, delightfully, by David Lopez and Peter Fernandes. Their female counterparts are Vanessa Sears, who can belt a tune or point a line with equal finesse, and Sabryn Rock.
The Opera House, where the show happens, is usually a rock-joint. Dress warm; it’s draughty.