Strange but true

Composer Stew bares all about his raucous Broadway hit "Passing Strange" -- and why his song "We Just Had Sex" won't be on TV on Tony night.

Editor's note: Salon spotlights theater this week in anticipation of Sunday's Tony Awards.

By James Hannaham

Read more: Broadway, Theater, Arts & Entertainment, Tony Awards, Arts & Entertainment Features, James Hannaham

June 11, 2008 | Stew, composer and star of "Passing Strange," which has been nominated for seven Tonys, would have had a tough time pitching his semiautobiographical musical to Broadway investors if it hadn't already done smashingly well at New York's Public Theater. The coming-of-age story concerns a young, gifted and black man called only "The Youth" who rejects his church upbringing in Los Angeles, flees his earnest, Lola Falana-ish mom and heads off to the Netherlands, then Germany. Tossing convention to the skies, the musical explores radical politics, performance art and experimental music, and encourages young Americans to have lots of illicit sex with Europeans. The orchestra -- technically a rock band, some of them from Stew's L.A.-based pop group the Negro Problem -- performs all the songs on the stage. The actors, in a homage to Brecht, move among them, sometimes interacting with the narrator, played by Stew himself, a short, self-described "chubby black man" with odd ears and a fondness for fedora hats. Hooked?

Well, no matter. Broadway's eager to fill the void that will be left by the closing of "Rent" this fall, and while last year's Tony darling, "Spring Awakening," has brought some much-needed rock attitude to the Great White Way, "Passing Strange," which premiered at California's Berkeley Rep, has an even more staunchly alternative aesthetic, a downtown pedigree and a cast of mixed-race folks who can play Germans -- convincingly. It has come along at the perfect moment. Accordingly, the quirky musical Stew referred to as "the black, gay, rock 'n' roll cousin of 'The Color Purple'" has garnered Tony nominations for best musical, best featured actor (Daniel Breaker, who plays "The Youth") and best featured actress (de'Adre Aziza, who gives life to the protagonist's diverse love interests). The other four nods -- best book, best original score, best orchestrations and best lead actor -- are for Stew himself, sometimes with collaborator Heidi Rodewald, with whom he wrote the music. This ties him with one of his similarly offbeat heroes, Anthony Newley (songwriter of "The Candyman" and "Goldfinger" among other accomplishments), and composer Elizabeth Swados for the record number of Tony nominations in a single year.

You'd think that by now Stew would be getting beverage service on his ego trip, but the 46-year-old still conceives of himself as an outsider and a nonactor, and remains convinced that "Passing Strange" isn't even a musical. The show's director, Annie Dorsen, he says, nailed it when she referred to the goings-on as a rock concert from which a play emerges. When he says he doesn't think he's going to win anything, it smacks of denial rather than false modesty. Stew sat down with Salon at an exposed-brick bistro near the theater where "Passing Strange" has been knocking out audiences including celebs like Rosie O'Donnell, Lauren Bacall and Harry Belafonte. In person, Stew was effervescent, not to mention exceptionally chatty -- more than once, he repeated the same sentence four times in a row.

"Passing Strange" is one of the few shows I've ever seen and thought, "Oh, I've had experiences like that." I said to myself, this must be what white people think about culture on a regular basis.

We made it for you! Most plays I see don't tend to speak to the so-called outsider. We did our play assuming that everybody had smoked pot as a teenager, that they knew what Amsterdam was all about, that they'd experienced racial alienation, and assuming they'd been as oppressed by their own community as they had by the outside world. We didn't go in thinking, "Oh my God, we're going to Broadway now -- we have to make it understandable for everyone." We assumed that everybody had a little bit of outsider in them.

That was the idea from the beginning?

Yeah, what the director liked was that when Heidi and I did our club act, when we talked to an audience of 250 people at Joe's Pub [the cabaret embedded in the Public Theater where "Passing Strange" had its New York debut], we said, "You're at this rock club at midnight. Odds are you're the kind of person we can talk to directly." Now, not everybody in the Broadway crowd has maybe snorted coke with a transvestite at 4:30 in the morning. But I'm like, "Well, if they haven't, I'm going to try to make them know what that's like." I'm not going to pretend that didn't happen. I think that's why we end up getting these 75-year-old ladies who come out of the play saying they really relate to it. And we ask them, "Oh, because you're a mom?" And they're like, "No, because I came to Greenwich Village in 1959 and freaked out!"

You started working on "Passing Strange" three years ago. Where did you see your career going before this?

Well, as a rock band, the Negro Problem had a lot of critical acclaim, which of course translated into millions of dollars -- you know critical acclaim always translates into millions of dollars. I'm just taking a break from my swimming pool in Hollywood to be on Broadway with the regular people. Actually we don't consider it "going" anywhere, Heidi and me. We're artists. We're lifers. We're not doing this to get famous or rich.

What did you know about theater or Broadway before you developed this show?

Very little. I had a lot of respect for people like Bertolt Brecht. I had read Brecht, and he touches a lot of rock performers more than any other theorist or writer in the theater world, I think, because his theories are very rock 'n' roll. Like the way he talks about the way an actor plays a role without trying to make anyone think that they are that character, and reminds the audience that they're watching a play. In high school, when you're a rock 'n' roll stoner, your mortal enemies are the thespians. We thought that musical theater was the dorkiest thing in the world and had nothing to do with the music we listened to. And quite frankly we still feel that way. I mean, uh, we don't understand why Broadway doesn't, for the most part, utilize the music of the street, the car, the headphones.

Next page: The myth of Europe as the promised land for black artists