Nearly two decades after it won top honors on Broadway, "Passing Strange" is finally coming to Los Angeles. The rock musical created by Stew and Heidi Rodewald is receiving its proper Southern California premiere at Pasadena Playhouse, staged by Zhailon Levingston, who won the Tony Award this year for best direction of a musical for "Cats: The Jellicle Ball."
When the show opened on Broadway in 2007, it scored major wins at the Tonys, the Drama Desk Awards and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. In the years since, a string of successful productions has taken cues from it, whether by putting social and racial issues up front through a fourth-wall-breaking protagonist or by keeping a live band on stage.
For its creators, the local arrival carries extra weight. Before the show's development took them to New York in the early 2000s, Stew and Rodewald were fixtures of the Los Angeles music scene as members of the critically hailed band the Negro Problem. Yet the musical somehow never landed in their hometown, even as it was staged in South America and Europe. "Passing Strange has been done in almost every major city except L.A.," Stew told Variety, adding that a London production was "a dream come true, so it's all good."
The Pasadena staging came together through Levingston. When the director sat down with Playhouse leadership to discuss what he might like to do, giving "Passing Strange" its SoCal premiere sat at the top of his list. Stew and Rodewald are not working on the production directly, instead watching appreciatively from afar. "He's a total visionary," Stew said of Levingston, adding that after hearing the director talk about the piece, he told him "it was made for him."
Vintage Trouble singer Ty Taylor stars as the Narrator, the stand-in for Stew, joined by Brittany Campbell, Britton Smith and Saycon Sengbloh. Stew and Rodewald performed in the show throughout its Broadway and pre-Broadway runs, and a pre-fame Colman Domingo had a supporting role; those performances can be seen in the film version directed by Spike Lee.
The musical sets elements of Stew's real coming-of-age to rock 'n' roll. Its earliest form was a cabaret piece called "Travelogue," performed at Joe's Pub and other New York clubs, in which the pair talked about places they had lived and experiences they had. The Public Theater then approached them about turning it into a theater work. "We said no three times, and then finally said yes," Stew said.
The creators maintain that Broadway was never the dream. "We weren't trying to please people. We were just pleasing ourselves," Rodewald said. Stew described their output as "3 a.m. music," the kind a cool friend plays for you on a record you have never heard before. "'Passing Strange' is a 3 a.m. musical," he said. "It's not something you're gonna get fed by the mainstream, but somebody very cool is gonna turn you onto it."
Reflecting on the show's legacy, Stew noted that afterward "every show wanted to have a band on stage," and that its once unusual lighting look was widely copied, though he argued the influence has remained mostly superficial and that musicals are still "pretty un-rocking." Rodewald said the show's reach became clear while touring, when audiences in places like Detroit told them, "Oh my God, I saw you on Broadway."
