"Passing Strange" Not to be Missed

What a trip! The final offering of New Rep’s season is not to be missed. Passing Strange is a tale of a young black man’s pilgrimage of self-discovery, told almost entirely in music. The narrator (Cliff Odele), an older and wiser version of the young hero, introduces and comments minimally on stages in the journey, but the real story is in the music, witty, rocking, poignant and moving – in more ways than one – by the end the audience is dancing in the aisles. Cheo Bourne is affectingly naïve and confused as a young black man growing up in a middleclass home in Los Angeles. He rebels against his mother’s church going (or rather her insistence on his church going) only to discover his first artistic family in the church choir where he is mentored by the choir director. Trapped by his own dependence on his minister father, the closeted gay choir director teaches our hero to smoke weed and implants in him a driving ambition to explore life, his true identity and artistic ambition in Europe.

He will one day have to deal with the mother (Cheryl D. Singleton) who created him, but for now the hero is off to seek a more authentic life and, though he would never admit it, find the substitute family where he can be the self he would like to be. He concedes Paris to his predecessor ex-pats James Baldwin and Josephine Baker, but announces his ambition to conquer the new capital of bohemianism, Amsterdam. With his mind blown by the experience of seeing hashish on a café menu, he is easily seduced by a young woman who offers him her keys in one of the play’s most haunting songs. He finds family in a squalid squat which to its blessed out inhabitants feels like paradise. The singers who populated the LA choir become his Amsterdam housemates, and with them he explores what it means to be an artist whose first creation must be himself. The young man is delighted and bemused by his companions’ combination of sexual and intellectual freedom, exemplified for him by his lover explaining the ramifications of Dutch colonialism with her shirt off.

But paradise cloys, and we’re off again, this time to Berlin where our pilgrim encounters yet another family, this time a radical anti-capitalist heavy metal collective. This family is more demanding, if somewhat silly in their intellectual pretentiousness. When they threaten to evict them, he wins their allegiance with a fake ghetto act – the middleclass black man still can’t be himself, still has to fit into someone else’s stereotypes.

There’s not a single weak spot in this multi-talented cast. The four actors who form the hero’s “family” in each new place, function as a chorus and are particularly striking in their chameleon ability to change vocal and movement styles to fit LA, Amsterdam and Berlin. Each member has moments in the spotlight, though Maurice Parent almost steals the show at a couple of striking moments.

The minimal set mimics a rock concert set-up and we are always conscious of the superb work of the four musicians who provide guitar, drums and keyboard back-up.

Passing Strange is a fitting conclusion to the season (although there is an added summer production to come). The staging and choreography are ingenious and well-executed and the musicians and dancers are definitely up to the task. It’s great fun. Don’t miss it.

~ Johanna Ettin