Just Ask The Song…

Passing Strange finds a larger audience, thanks to Stew, Spike Lee, & IFC

True lovers of cinema have access to “The Real.”  The phenomenal rock musical and Tony Award winning play, Passing Strange has been given new life, access to a wider audience, and a slick new silver screen stage.   Spike Lee’s filmed version of the play is available on DVD and if you haven't seen it yet, it's absolutely unmissable.

A rock musical created by long-time musician, Stew -- an experienced performer and first-time Broadway sensation -- Passing Strange is a wildly moving, boundary-leaping, autobiographical play.  You can read about Stew’s journey here.  To delve deeper into the idea of cultural clichés that fueled the musical’s themes and for more background on Stew, check this article in Psychology Today.

Passing Strange is the story of a rebellious young black artist, traveling in search of art and love, a place, a song, “the real.”  Stew wrote Passing Strange to “work the wound” of his own adolescence, and it was a special experience for the select few who had the opportunity to make it to Broadway or the Public Theater.  Spike Lee recorded a few of the historic performances, including the closing night show, and he pieced together a kinetic piece of electric live theater, smoothed out over celluloid.

Passing Strange, named in part for a passage in Othello referring to the wooing of Desdemona, has several meanings (as does wooing).  Stew spent a lifetime wooing an audience.  He was wooing a shadow of himself in the form of the play’s title character, Youth.  He was passing time -- indescribably strange, unsettling in its rhythm.  Stew was passing through life, memory, cliché, the many masks that a person wears when seeking authenticity of life, of the self.  He was passing through guises, incarnations, the ebbing of the flow, the many dimensionalities of ‘reality.’  A beat passing through the soul feels like this, moves like this.

From his website, Stew recalled in an interview:  “Obviously, the term “passing” has deep historical meaning for any African American my age or older. My grandmother was light enough to pass. But the kid in this play discovers there’s more to passing than just black folks passing for white. The term “passing” also has to do with time passing, of course.” It far transcends skin color.

Stew’s heartbreak simmers behind wise eyes shaded in orange tinted glasses, oozing through rough guitar riffs and the cracked voice of a narrator lost in song.  His show is passing through lapsed time, soaking the scars in painful, strikingly cathartic melody.  To face the past as a direct reaction to the present, you must twist your perception, backbend, bleed as you breathe, shout.  You must “ask the song.”

And now we all have the opportunity to watch Stew dance to his own metronome, and it’s more than “alright.”  It’s transcendent.  Click here to visit the film’s awesome website for more details, and ogle the scenes from the movie.  You can also click here for the New York Times blog with sound byte snippets from Stew and Spike Lee.

Onscreen, the anti-musical sensation Passing Strange stays true to itself, to the source, to Stew.  It swelters in the orange shade of electric guitar, settles into the sunset.  Never fades.