Young American.(Passing Strange)(Theater review)

Not since Stephen Sondheim introduced a kind of Jewish skepticism and irony to the Broadway musical, in the nineteen-fifties, and Tony Kushner revolved his 2003 show, "Caroline, or Change," around the ways in which class intersects with race have we had such a finely crafted, ethnic-minded American musical as "Passing Strange" (at the Public). "Passing Strange" is a brilliant work about migration--a geographical migration but also its hero's migration beyond the tenets of "blackness" and toward selfhood. Unlike Sondheim and Kushner, the musician and singer Stew, who created "Passing Strange," which is an autobiography of sorts, doesn't distract us with exoticism or nostalgia; his story centers on a young black man who discovers his own Americanness while growing up, first, in Los Angeles and, later, in Europe. The Youth (Daniel Breaker) is a rock-and-roll Candide--a wanderer whose innocence is never entirely corrupted.

At the start of the show, three musicians rise through the stage. They support or provide counterpoint to the guitar-wielding Narrator, the Youth's older alter ego, who is played by Stew. (In addition to writing the show's book and lyrics, Stew co-wrote the propulsive music, with Heidi Rodewald.) After introducing himself ("Now, you don't know me / And I don't know you / So let's cut to the chase / My name is Stew / I'll be narrating this gig so just sit tight"), the Narrator, a short, stocky charmer, with a shaved head, yellow-tinted glasses, and a cotton-candy goatee, wins us over almost at once. Given the rock-and-roll element of the show, we are somewhat jadedly expecting a more colored version of "Rent," with a bit of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" thrown in. Instead, the Narrator establishes himself as an ironist with a comfortable, middle-class pedigree. In his distinctive, soothing baritone, Stew sings, staring straight out at the audience, "Now, since it's my job I'm gonna set the scene / In a big two-story black middle-class dream / With all the mod cons, the manicured lawns / Some savings bonds, a boy and his mom / Talkin' mid-seventies South Central L.A. / A colored paradise where the palm trees sway / But this promised land wasn't delivering the goods / Even in this best of all possible hoods."

The Youth's mother (Eisa Davis) enters. She stands ramrod straight and beautiful, her hair pulled back in a bun. She's imperious but loving as she confronts her son with righteous indignation about his interest in Buddhism. Why won't he go with her to the Lord's house? Slouching in a bright-colored shirt, his eyes as big as those in a Keane painting, the teen-aged Youth will have none of this. Why should he go to church? he asks. (The majority of the show is sung, not spoken.) What do all those black people wailing and shouting for salvation have to do with true spirituality? (In a side-splitting moment, the Narrator points out how the mother slips into "Negro dialect" when admonishing her son about religion--thus sending up the standard American theatrical device of making black performers sound more "real" by substituting "de" for "the.")

The Youth does eventually go with her to church, but he discovers a different god there: rock and roll. He realizes that the gospel music his mother and the other parishioners sing is where Chuck Berry had his roots. Not that the Youth wants to be a rock star--not exactly. He's more interested in an offshoot of rock, punk music, which separates him further from conventional ideas of blackness in the seventies.

Before long, the Youth has assembled a ragtag band, the Scaryotypes, that plays punk--badly. Good parodists, Stew and Rodewald exaggerate punk's driving, staccato rhythms and make a tender joke of them. Still, Stew has something less humorous to say about youth in general and this Youth in particular, when he has him sing, in an unmelodic drone:

1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4, I'm at war with Negro mores, I'm at war with ghetto norms, My mother stands in doorways beggin' , me ...