Passing Strange at the Young Vic review: a rock-gig musical with undeniable verve and brio
Style and swagger mask a lack of substance in this semi-autobiographical 2008 rock-gig musical from American writer-musician Stew, about a young black man trying to find himself as a person and an artist.
A charismatic Giles Terera fronts a tight three-piece band, working through a variety of song genres and passing fondly ironic commentary on the picaresque journey of the character known only as the Youth (Keenan Munn-Francis) to a form of enlightenment.
The story, originally created by Stew with director Annie Dorsen, is simultaneously familiar, sketchy, self-indulgent and pretentious, but it’s told in Liesl Tommy’s new production with undeniable verve and brio.
The title comes from Othello where “passing” means “extremely”, but refers here also to black people who “pass” for white. The Youth has a cosy, churchy, middle-class life with his mother in suburban 1970s LA and embraces marijuana and punk – mild forms of both, it seems – to escape. Amsterdam brings him more dope, sex and some low-level consciousness-raising.
The cartoonish version of Berlin he then fetches up in is scarier, full of riots, amphetamines and politicised performance artists who challenge his invented tales of ghetto oppression. Finally, loss teaches him that “the real is a construct” and that he can only truly be himself by transforming his authentic pain – whatever that may be – into art.
Set out baldly, this sounds like the most ghastly, adolescent self-mythologising. In performance, it’s a lot more fun. The musicians noodle on a wedge-shaped stage, bare apart from some scraps of furniture, lots of amps and two rear video screens, as we walk in.
Four performers walk awkwardly on and off, until Terera arrives, booted and jumpsuited, to establish a jokey complicity with us and kick off the first song, We Might Play All Night, a riot of fuzzy bass and jangling guitar.
The songs, by Stew and Heidi Rodewald, sit broadly in the channel of rowdy, bluesy pop-rock but there’s also a sweet ballad, Keys (sung with great beauty by Nadia Violet Johnson), and some witty patter songs including the smirkingly clever We Just Had Sex.
Forays into punk and industrial numbers are – like the depictions of intellectualized European hedonism – less convincing. Terera side-eyes the musical director/keyboardist while admitting the show’s creators “don’t know how to write” a Broadway-style showtune.
For all its exuberance and its preoccupation with self-expression, this is a strangely insular show. We learn nothing about the Youth beyond his inner struggles and most characters are two-dimensional and OTT.
It works thanks to the elevating performances of Munn-Francis (including a hectic, desperate tap-dance) and the three female cast members: Johnson and Renée Lamb as his girlfriends and Rachel Adedeji as his mother.
And to Terera, surely among the most compelling and versatile actors we have today, able to manipulate an audience, an electric guitar, and moments of pathos and bathos with equal aplomb.
Young Vic, to July 6; buy tickets here
