Passing Strange
This 2008 Tony Award-winning, semi-autobiographical rock musical swaggers onto the Young Vic’s main stage in a blaze of colour and sound and with a hefty wink at the audience, as it makes its belated European debut. Beginning in a stiflingly church-overshadowed late 1970s California, we follow the Black American Youth (Keenan Munn-Francis) as he escapes to Europe to discover ‘the real’ through music. Our guide across this genre-hopping, guitar-driven landscape of self-discovery and loss is his older self, the Narrator, played by Olivier-winning ex-‘Hamilton’ star Giles Terera. With book and lyrics by Stew – aka US musican Mark Stewart, who drew inspiration from his own life – and music by Heidi Rodewald, ‘Passing Strange’ passes comment on itself from the start. Initially, its meta narrative provides a wry commentary on ‘respectability’ in Youth’s experience of the Black church he is cajoled into attending by his mother, where he ends up smoking weed with the pastor’s closeted son (also the conductor of the choir). ‘Passing’ becomes the show’s theme as Youth rebels against one identity only to play up other personas in order to fit in, initially, with the joints and free love of Amsterdam and then the piercings and performance-art protest of Berlin. Liesel Tommy’s staging of the show has charisma to spare, as the rest of the ensemble cast move seamlessly around the four-strong, on-stage band whose banter with the Narrator provides a playful undernote to Stew’s almost novelist