Passing Strange!
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Hey everyone,
So if you know me at all, you know that I am obsessed with the musical “Passing Strange”. My story with Passing Strange is kind of fun, because I didn’t want to see it when I first read about it in the NY Times that February, and then when I went to the city in March, my friend Debra Evans informed me that if she was going to help me find cheap tickets, I was required to see Passing Strange. I begrudgingly agreed. Man, was I wrong. I was on the edge of my seat, laughing uproariously, crying, rocking out, enjoying myself fully, just the way theatre was meant to be. I saw many shows that week, including Sunday in the Park with George, In The Heights, A Catered Affair, and more; and Passing Strange easily took the cake for the best thing I saw that season. I came home, saddened that no CD of the show
existed yet, and told everyone to go see it if they were in New York. Not many people listened.
Fast forward a few months and we’re in June of 2008, the CD rendition of Passing Strange is totally a letdown in comparison with the beauty of the show, many songs are overlooked, and the interludes which made the show so great aren’t in there. Passing Strange also gets absolutely shafted at the Tony’s; losing everything except for Best Book of a Musical. (The only one I thought it was a lock to win was Best Lighting, considering the lighting made the show, there was no set…but that’s just me. I mean, look at this picture!) I am furious, however the Passing Strange Tony’s performance was quite dreadful, I must say. They picked the one song that I feel was weak in the show (Amsterdam which then fused into Keys…it was a weird cut), because it was the most mainstream. I think if they’d trusted the people to accept rock on Broadway, they could have done a different song (like It’s Alright), and totally blown the house away.
Very soon afterwards, Passing Strange announced that it was closing…on July 20th 2008. If you remember my life about that time, I wasn’t having the best spring/summer. I had torn two of the ligaments in my knee and was awaiting knee surgery, the one awesome part of my summer had been Henry Fonda and the Falsettos in North Reading with Dave Grossman and company, but it was over by then. So I was doing nothing with my time, waiting for my surgery on July 23rd. Also if you know my life well enough, you know that July 20th is my birthday, and that just seemed like a sign that I was meant to go to the closing performance. I immediately got on the phone and ordered five tickets to the show, figuring I could find people to go with me later. I attended the final performance with Debra Evans (of course), and then Sarah Brenner, Kyle Johnson, and Hugo Moreno, all people I’d met at orientation for Ithaca earlier that summer. It was amazing. Spike Lee was there filming the final few performances to turn into a DVD, so the energy was high, the audience was all people who truly loved Passing Strange like myself, and the performers were amazing as always. Colman Domingo still takes the cake as the best stage presence I’ve ever experienced, and Rebecca Naomi Jones was absolutely rocking that night. There was not a weak link in the cast however, between Daniel Breaker (making quite a name for himself in Shrek right now), de’Adre Aziza, Eisa Davis, Chad Goodridge, and of course Stew, the cast was phenomenal. Also not forgetting the band led by Stew collaborator Heidi Rodewald. The show went on, it was amazing…again, and I left there feeling like I’d just witnessed the end of something special. Of course I got autographs, and took pictures with cast members.
So afterwards the experience was over, right? Or so I thought. Deb and I said goodbye to Sarah, Kyle, and Hugo, and went across the street to a restaurant to have some dinner before going back to her Brooklyn apartment. There we saw some people with shirts that said “The Scareotypes” on the front and “Passing Strange” on the back. Now I had been looking for just such a shirt but could not find one, and Deb and I went over to ask where they had purchased them. The answer was they had made them, and they were Passing Strange nuts from Broadwayworld.com, they didn’t actually know each other but had met up to see the final performance. We sat and had dinner with them, of course. One of them, as it turns out, was a Belasco Usher, and therefore had been invited to the cast party, but wasn’t planning on attending because she didn’t actually know anyone in the show. She would change her mind, she said, if she knew someone to go with. She asked all of us, would we like to go. Would you have said no? Yeah, me neither. So off we went to a bar about 4 blocks from the Belasco which Passing Strange was having their cast and crew party at. It ended up being myself, Deb, the four people we had dinner with, the cast and crew of Passing Strange, and Spike Lee and his entourage hanging out for a good portion of the night before Spike Lee, and the cast departed to sleep before a performance without the audience for the camera the following day. From then on it was just us, the crew, and the band. Awesome. I went back to Deb’s, caught a bus back to Maine early the following morning, and that was that.
You may be wondering why on earth I’m telling this story to you now, in January of 2010. Well because Passing Strange is back on my radar. You see just last night, Passing Strange aired nationwide on PBS’ Great Performances, twice, once at 9PM EST and once at 1AM EST. Also on Tuesday the DVD was released worldwide, for purchase from anywhere you like to buy DVDs (I got mine from Bullmoose Music, a. because I like buying from local Portland shops, and b. because they have it for way cheaper than amazon, best buy, fye, or any of them!) It is a very very good capturing of the Musical. One major problem I have is in an attempt to not ruin the audience’s viewing, they kept the cameras out of the line of sight for the show, which is fine, but it means that most of the shots are closeups. A lot of the beauty of seeing the whole stage is lost by this. My favorite moment in the show is during Identity, when Daniel Breaker drops the four lights he’s holding, and they are slowly dragged away from him into the pit. This was barely even captured on the DVD because the cameras were focussed on Breaker, and not the whole image. All in all, though, Spike Lee did a damn good job making sure that the show was encapsulated for a viewing audience. I doubt if Passing Strange will ever appear again, without Stew I just don’t think it can work, so the DVD is what we’ve got. Buy it, ASAP. You wont regret it, and you will witness one of the most moving, and powerful pieces of (musical theatre? rock?) that I, and many others have ever experienced.
“Call it a rock concert with a story to tell.
Call it a sprawling piece of performance art.
I’ll just call it wonderful.”
- Charles Isherwood, New York Times
I don’t think there’s any other words that need to be said than that.
Passing Strange is available for $19.99 from Amazon.com. Starring Stew, Daniel Breaker, Eisa Davis, Colman Domingo, de’Adre Aziza, Rebecca Naomi Jones, and Chad Goodridge. Directed by Spike Lee. Featuring Heidi Rodewald, Jon Spurney, Christian Cassan, and Christian Gibbs as The Band. Filmed live at the Belasco Theatre 111 West 44th Street, Between 6th and 7th Avenue, New York, NY 10036
