The Daily Telegraph - Features
A paean to the joys of going off the rails
Passing Strange
Young Vic, London SE1
★★★★☆
I only had the haziest idea of what to expect from Passing Strange, gleaning, as anyone could, that it’s written by a guy called Stew, was briefly on Broadway in 2008 – where it was showered with Tony Award nominations – and was filmed by Spike Lee. To quote the Young Vic’s promotional material, it concerns: “A young musician [who] sets out on an electrifying musical odyssey to find himself and his place in the world.”
The imprimatur of the Young Vic for this European premiere production – directed by Liesl Tommy – should be grounds enough to get excited. Except that the theatre’s reputation suffered a dent with its nondescript musical about Nelson Mandela in 2022.
No such ho-hum response is invited here, though. Passing Strange is so wildly, and often loudly, offbeat that there’s never a dull moment. Presented as an amplifier-filled “gig theatre” happening, with the musicians embedded among the cast, and projected video adding to a sense of concert-going dynamism, it comically mines a subject of abiding fascination: that youthful period when you want to make sense of the world while grappling with the riddle of your identity.
The experiences relayed – drawing on those of Mark Lamar Stewart (the co-composer, with his personal and professional partner Heidi Rodewald) – combine the universal and the particular. As embodied by Giles Terera, who takes centre stage with an amused, conspiratorial air and a plain aptitude for electric guitar, Stew is a middle-aged man of African-American heritage looking back to an upbringing in Los Angeles that was uneventfully middle class.
With Keenan Munn-Francis giving us the wide-eyed incarnation of Stew’s younger self, we follow this boho-inclined sort’s progress from the local gospel choir, past a flirtation with his own teen punk band, to flying the nest and seeking mind-expanding adventures in Europe. Indeed, the show’s resonant appeal lies in its suggestion that an inquiring mind can genuinely be transformed through rites-of-passage sex, drugs and experimentation.
Passing Strange evokes a now distant 1980s Europe, but its non-judgmental, good-humoured aspect reminds you of that more recent past, before selfies, social media and social justice took mindless hold. Not revelatory, perhaps, but invigoratingly strange, and bittersweet.
Until July 6. Tickets: 020 7922 2922; youngvic.org