MOLI VIEW™

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)."

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