A Slight Delay

This is, I think, the third time I’m writing about Passing Strange, Stew’s musical at the Belasco Theater. The first time, I was exhilarated. I’d just seen the show a few days previous on its opening weekend, and still had the whole experience bouncing around in my head. The second time, I was hopeful; it was just before the Tony Awards, and I had hoped that there might be sufficient buzz around the play that people might actually go to see it. And I saw it a second time a couple of Saturdays ago, fiancee and parents in tow.

The third time–this time–I’m disappointed and a little pissed. Passing Strange will close after its matinee performance this coming Sunday. I realize that I probably sound a bit like a fanboy in that last paragraph, and I also realize that three posts about anything in the space of six months may seem excessive. On the other hand, I’ve been a fan of Mark Stewart’s music and lyrics since the first time I heard The Negro Problem’s Post Minstrel Syndrome about ten years ago, and have followed everything that’s come since. It doesn’t seem right, somehow, that something this good, from a writer this good and a cast/band so phenomenally talented, should end quite this way.

Not right, but maybe not surprising. While I don’t think that musical styles are in any way inherently incompatible or irreconcilable, I kinda think that Broadway has ossified to a point that its denizens were never quite sure what to make of Passing Strange.It seems to me that the consensus is that innovation’s fine, but only to a point; it has to be innovation that’s within a comfortable context. If you want to do a musical on roller skates, that’s fine, so long as it has that certain je ne sais Webber. But when what goes on up on stage has all the passion and energy of a rock concert, and when all the crowd can muster is the passion and energy of… well, your typical Broadway audience, maybe something’s got to give.

Or does it? Look back to Kern, Porter, the Gershwins… there was a time when that stuff was innovative, rather than being the template for mere repetition and stagnation. It’s not as though PS had to play to half-empty houses to half-bewildered people.

I used to be of two minds sometimes about artists that are a bit obscure. There’s a certain music geek badge of honor that goes with knowing something good when nobody else does. Maybe it comes from getting out more often, or maybe it’s because I’m not 22 any more, but there’s a part of me that sees music especially as a kind of communal activity, something essentially social. And when you come across something that’s that good, whether it’s Stew or Richard Thompson or Manu Chao or even just a Stevie Wonder album you haven’t played in years and had forgotten how much you loved it (unimaginable to me, but play along for a minute), you want to share it. You want someone else to have that same a-ha moment, or to get those same goosebumps, the same lump in the throat, that you did, even if it’s not at the exact same parts, or for the exact same reasons.

The irony here is that a musical that lays a pretty critical eye on what happens when you look a little too hard for “the Real” was maybe too real for its own good. The same reason that it resonated with me, and with anyone else that fell in love with it, wasn’t because it was Broadway, or because of some set or other of signifiers it had attached to it; it was content to be nothing other than itself, raw, honest, and pretty unfiltered. In other words, exactly the wrong thing to be if you confuse ”authenticity” with the status quo.

But it was fun while it lasted. The original cast album is a great document. Spike Lee has filmed the proceedings (distribution is still in the works). And I’ll go back one last time on closing night, reveling in the goosebumps, the exuberance, the sheer racket, the singing along ’til the blue-haired old lady in front of me gives me dirty looks (and then singing louder), and being thankful for all the above.

Tags: Broadway musicals, Heidi Rodewald, Passing Strange, Stew

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.