"Passing Stange": with Flying Colors?

by Jack Craib, New Rep Reviewer

In the last show of its current regular season, New Rep’s version of the musical “Passing Strange”, there is on stage as much talent as has ever graced any off-Tremont stage in recent Boston theater history. New Rep’s production of Stew’s 2008 semi-autobiographical Broadway creation makes a case for being arguably the best possible presentation of the work. The original production in New York lasted just over four months, perhaps primarily due to its sole Tony Award for the best book of the season (not all that impressive, given its only serious competition was the excellent “In the Heights“; the others were the amiably air headed “Xanadu” and the flop “Cry Baby”).

Whereas most often musicals find their biggest challenge in forming a coherent and engaging book, this happens to be this musical’s strong point. Stew’s book and lyrics, for which he alone gets credit, are often witty and sometimes wise, as in the memorable line “my porno films feature fully dressed men making business deals”, or “no one on this stage knows what it‘s like to hustle on the mean streets of South Central (L.A.)”. Some of it is predictable and too often polemic; still, there is more than enough there for coherence and engagement. It must be said that Stew at least tackled some heavyweight issues. Can meaning be found in art? Is life “a mistake that only art can correct”? Do we really spend our “whole adult lives acting on the decisions of a teenager”?

Yet this is a musical, and there’s the rub. The musical score, credited to Stew and Heidi Rodewald, is by and large repetitive, undistinguished and instantly forgettable. Stew himself has his main character, the Narrator (played by Cliff Odle, the only performer who didn’t seem comfortable with his or her part) admit at one point that this would be a good place to include a show tune about a youth (identified only as, uh, Youth, played by the extraordinary Cheo Bourne) planning to travel to Europe; the only hitch is that he admits he can’t write that kind of show tune. This seems obvious by this point in the work, which isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. Other productions (notably “Spring Awakening” and “In the Heights”) broke new musical ground with their alternative rock and salsa.

Here Stew and Rodewald dish up lukewarm rock, punk, funk and gospel, and, with a few brief exceptions (“Mom Song”, and snippets of “Amsterdam” and “Keys”) they disappoint. Later in the production, Stew has the gall to ridicule the showtuniness of “On the Street Where You Live” (that somewhat memorable little ditty from a musical you may have heard of, “My Fair Lady”). Even Sondheim has been known to indulge in self-deprecating humor about his atypical scores (as in “Merrily We Roll Along” when a character sings that he likes a song you can hum, then references “Some Enchanted Evening”), but he has the musical chops to get away with it. If you’re going to dis an entire musical genre, you’d better be prepared to back up your own claim to fame. On the basis of this score, Stew fails to do so.

Who don’t fail, and in fact do pass with flying colors, are the creative talent on and behind the stage. One standout, Cheryl D. Singleton (as Mother) has an all too brief scene near the end and provides the single moment of heart of the entire evening. All of the performances by the rest of the cast, including De’Lon Grant, Eve Kagan, Maurice Parent, and Kami Rushell Smith, as well as the direction by Kate Warner and choreography by Kelli Edwards, contribute seamlessly to a production that caps off a memorable season of works of transformation.

The only misstep is a musical finale, after a rather abrupt and flat ending, in which the entire cast gets involved in one of the oldest and most overdone theatrical clichés, the forced audience participation game. As they belt out the hypothetical question “Is It All Right?” and their own answer, “Yeah, it’s all right”, one is tempted to paraphrase Stew from elsewhere in the book: “Yes and No. That is, Yo”.