Stew
looks sardonically out at the audience in New York's Belasco Theater
from his vantage point at center stage. Sometimes, as he narrates the
action of Passing Strange, the show he wrote with Heidi Rodewald, which just won two Obies and is nominated for seven Tonies,
he sets his heavy black glasses on top of his head and pauses with lips
pressed tight, emphasizing a particular absurdity – of a character, the
plot, the whole situation of being a longtime outsider artist finally
let in. It’s a healthily skeptical narrative device that intellectually
keeps this smart, funny play from becoming what it has actually become:
a Broadway musical. “Can you believe it?” the gesture says. Well, yes.

Passing Strange,
which moved from the Public Theatre to the Belasco February 8, is the
story of that skeptical artiste as a young man. The Youth, played with
just the right mix of wide-eyed gawkish disdain by Daniel Brecker,
escapes the phony palm-tree-studded life of growing up black and middle
class in LA by following his muse to Amsterdam and Berlin, where he
falls in with hippies, anarchists, and performance artists. Stew thanks
GW Bush for the show’s inspiration. “When I found out that he had never
been to Europe in his youth (or in his adulthood until he became
prez!!!) I immediately knew I wanted to write a play about a kid who
wanted to go to Europe,” he writes on the show’s website.
“That fact about Bush said a lot to me about America's lack of interest
in anything foreign except that which it can exploit (always to exploit
– never to learn from).”

In the show, Stew, who with Rodewald
had a band called the Negro Project for a decade, is just as critical
of Euro bohos’ curious interest in and ignorance of his background as
he is of American close-mindedness. In order not to get evicted as a
pop capitalist pig, the Youth winds up playing the skin card,
pretending to have been a kind of Crip to his communal flat-mates – who
lap up his gangsta art. “No one in this play knows what it’s like to
sell a dime in South Central,” Stew drily states to the Belasco crowd,
making fun of what must have been his own adolescent shuck and jive –
and raising a red flag for any minstrel tendencies in this current song
and dance.

Years ago I recall seeing Stew busking in the Astor
Place subway station; I’d like to say I recognized his Elvis
Costelloish genius back then, but I’d be lying. I’m definitely rooting
for him Tony night, June 15. He’s the lucky, worthy struggling artist
who has finally hit the lottery – bravo for his capitalist pop!

Passing Strange will perform Tuesdays at 7 p.m.; Wednesdays - Saturdays at 8 pm;
Wednesday and Saturday matinees at 2 p.m.; and Sundays at 3 p.m. at the Belasco
Theatre (111 West 44th Street) on Broadway. Tickets are priced $111.50 - $66.50
- $36.50 - $26.50, and are available through Tele-charge at www.TeleCharge.com,
or by calling 212-239-6200.

For additional information onPassing Strange, visit www.PassingStrangeOnBroadway.com.