Stew's Passing Strange Is Perfectly Seasoned

Photo: Carol Rosegg
(left to right): 1. Chad Goodridge, Daniel Breaker, Colman Domingo, Stew and Rebecca Naomi Jones

Reviewed by Tony Vellela

Passing Strange, at the Belasco, cannot be neatly categorized, its story cannot be easily encapsulated, and its energy cannot be remotely contained.  Its title is lifted from Othello, another classic that involves the tortured journey of a Black man trying to live at odds with his identity.

Here are some of the reasons why Passing Strange is the Best Musical of the 2007-2008 season ...

It's not really a musical.  It's a lyric rap-inspired coming-of-age performance poem set to a dazzling array of musical styles. 

It's not the conventional 'coming-of-age' story.  Writer Stew takes his personal journey, that stretches back a few decades, lays it out in nostalgic detail, then slaps you in the face with its universal relevance.

You can hear it.  As Stew relates this indictment of modern hypocritical society with an intelligence rarely heard in musical theatre, the audio component of the performance is calibrated so carefully that it actually allows you to comprehend what is being said and spoken.  Kudos to sound designer Tom Morse.

Your imagination is permitted to use itself — not in the 'back wall painted black' style, or the' three chairs and a light bulb' style, but in the style of the most stimulating Expressionist paintings come to life.

It's genuinely emotional.  The stripped-down basics of this person's formative years, fleeing from an upper middle class African-American Los Angeles suburb  to Amsterdam and then Berlin during the post-hippie  [1978] era challenges the cynical, mocks the self-indulgent pseudo-sophisticate and inspires the innocent.  As Youth, the central character stand-in for Stew, adopts Zen Buddhist attitudes and angst-driven lost artist zeal, he embraces whatever happens to him or whoever happens to come to him, all the while seeking to catch the previous decade's spirit to Do Your Own Thing.  From The Glass Menagerie to The Fantasticks, the coming-of-age journeys that have endured are the ones that anyone can relate to, despite the specifics.  Youth is this generation's stage version of Francois Truffaut's  Antoine Doinel.   In this stunning case, Stew selectively pulls from his own CV of creative acts,  and guides us through the experiences and their interpretations as deftly as Thornton Wilder's Stage Manager.  This usually mishandled device succeeds here because we see him doing it to his younger self, and he lets us in on it, mistakes and all.  It's as poignant as Little Edie in the second act of Grey Gardens; telling us about the grim emptiness and emotional exhaustion of another winter in a summer town.

And since this is a musical, it must be emphasized that the musical elements [lyrics by Stew, and the composing shared with Heidi Rodewald],  which flows effortlessly and naturally from gospel, rock, rap and soul to jazz, funk and punk, is amazing.  Period.

When The Beatles released their animated feature Yellow Submarine in 1968, a popular parlor game (often chemically-enhanced) involved listing the acid-inspired sight gags and the visual non-sequiturs, missing the "whole" point — the synergy that all the parts resulted in a unified experience.  So, yes, Stew manages to weave in unobtrusively people as diverse as James Brown, Picasso, Fred Astaire, Josephine Baker, Fellini, Hendricks, Camus, Hegel and James Baldwin, as well as My Fair Lady, The Wizard of Oz, Cabaret, and Bach fugues.  But the whole is a live stage experience similar to the culinary version of its key creator's name — a savory theatrical stew of sounds, sights, thoughts, moves, and most of all — words.  Stew's book and lyrics rise above anything else Broadway presents eight times a week.  He reports on the times when "You can trip all day till your mind just melts; makes Berkeley look like the Bible Belt." He chuckles recalling that "Molotov cocktails cops could handle; but performance art scared them to death."  He confesses that "my pain fucked my ego and I called the bastard art."

On March 31, 1943, the curtain went up on another revolutionary musical.  Instead of a big rousing chorus number, an old woman sat alone on a prairie front porch, churning butter.  Oklahoma! broke a good many conventional Musicals' molds, and with any luck at all, Passing Strange will do the same.  In case it doesn't, make sure you catch this one, because it's not the 'strange' that should be of concern, but the 'passing.'

PASSING STRANGE will perform Tuesdays at 7pm; Wednesdays - Saturdays at 8pm; Wednesday and Saturday matinees at 2pm; and Sundays at 3pm at the Belasco Theatre (111 West 44th Street) on Broadway. Tickets are priced $111.50 - $66.50 - $36.50 - $26.50, and are available through Tele-charge at www.TeleCharge.com, or by calling 212-239-6200. For additional information, visit www.PassingStrangeOnBroadway.com.

TONY VELLELA, the veteran theatre correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, writes and produces the PBS series about theatre, "Character Studies" His work has also appeared in Parade, Theatre Week, USA Today, Dramatics, Rolling Stone, and several other publications.

Sheba is Back

Sheba is Back by Tony Vellela

She calls her husband ‘Daddy.’ It’s mid twentieth-century Middle America, in an average-looking small home. And in William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba,” judging this piece’s gravitas based on its familiarity and commonplace appearances would be deceptively simplistic. If you want to understand who lives here, don’t look at the furniture; look under the carpet.

Like he did in his sturdy plays “Bus Stop,” “Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” in the Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama “Picnic,” and in his Oscar-winning screenplay for “Splendor in the Grass,” Inge throws open the front porches and back doors of small-town life. If your reaction summons a feeling of clichéd nostalgia, you have not allowed yourself to view these works as contemporary for their era, a very common mistake with plays that take place in the recent past. No one looks at Ibsen and thinks ‘nostalgia’ now, despite the similarities in how each playwright bores in on a specific, particular domestic universe. Out of the routines of daily life, Inge mines deeper truths that transcend time, place, class and status.

Now in her late forties, Lola’s teen-age beauty queen looks and figure have faded, along with much of her spirit. When she and ‘Doc’ married, in the 1920s, it was a forced union, but the failed pregnancy also signaled the death of that momentary passion that brought them together. Instead of keeping to his track to become a doctor, he was forced to abort his professional career plans. He now works as a chiropractor, and struggles with alcoholism daily. To make ends meet, they take in a college boarder every year. The current resident is Marie, a consciously flirtatious young woman studying art, and practicing the art of young womanhood. Both of her studies are progressing nicely.

In this current revival at the Biltmore Theatre, presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club, Lola is brought to life in a mesmerizing performance by S. Epatha Merkerson. If audience members only know her as the pointed Lt. Van Buren on NBC’s flagship “Law & Order” series for the past fourteen years, they will be surprised at what others have known for some time – this is a gifted, meticulous actor with great range, most notably seen in the HBO television production of “Lackawanna Blues,” and in the Broadway premiere of August Wilson’s haunting “The Piano Lesson.”

Presenting the ‘facts,’ like reading a resume, does not reveal what’s behind the words. Doc suppresses his attraction to Marie, and masks it as concern for her welfare when she takes up with a track star jock. Lola’s loneliness is broken only by her compulsive need to talk – to anyone – and not just the postman and the mailman, but even a wrong number caller. And Marie plays with Doc’s infatuation like a child tormenting a kitten with a dangling bit of yarn. When Marie’s ‘innocence’ is, in Doc’s blinder-bound eyes, violated, his fragile personal identity is shattered, and he surrenders to the bottle. His violent rampage, lashing out at Lola, reveals the tenuous thread that sometimes keeps the marriage together, and the consequences whenever that thread snaps.

This is a relationship between unequals – and this is not a reference to the mixed-race casting of Merkerson as Lola and Kevin Anderson as her husband. In 1950, nearly all marriages were between the dominant man and the subservient wife, and the degree of inequality had to do with her education and social status, or his willing participation in a union with someone on his level. Lola is uneducated, while Doc was on a track to medical school. Lola likes to listen to popular hit parade music; Doc relaxes listening to “Ave Maria.” But the widest gulf between them is each one’s view of how happy they are in the marriage, or how willing they are to perpetuate its myth. And when that gulf opens up, he drinks, becomes abusive and self-destructive, and moves them once again to the brink of destruction. And what is her vision of where she can find refuge? With her family, which requires getting ‘permission’ to return home. At the height of the current crisis, she calls and asks her mother if “Daddy will let me come home.” That rejection tells us why she sometimes calls her husband ‘Daddy.’ Even the younger-generation Marie, swept away at the end by her fiancé, tells Lola that “Bruce says I can visit.” This lack of female empowerment informs “Come Back, Little Sheba,” and when you look carefully into Lola/Merkerson’s eyes, and watch closely at her carefully measured behavior to keep Doc satisfied, it is that fear of losing his approval that has been swept under the rug.

Two other points about this production have gotten somewhat off the track in other commentary. Yes, Inge is generous in his use of symbols – Marie’s jock friend throws the javelin, and poses for her in shorts, holding his spear; yes, Lola’s little dog Sheba represents her lost youth. But those who decry these symbols overlook their own allowance of seemingly more sophisticated symbols from later work – look at Ruth in the current revival of Pinter’s “The Homecoming,” slowly sipping from a water glass, or Colin McPherson placing his “Seafarer” saga on Christmas Eve. It’s a bit patronizing to hit on Inge for doing something sixty years ago that has continued, in newer ways, ever since.

And the discussion about the mixed race casting of Lola and Doc misses two key points: Inge places his play in middle America in 1950, more than twenty years after this couple married, making them newlyweds in the 1920s, when such a marriage was illegal in most states. That introduces a backstory that Inge did not intend, making them even more rebellious than we are shown. The question that needs asking is why not cast an African-American Doc? There is no shortage of middle-aged gifted actors in that category. Making Doc a white character married to an African-American wife adds unspoken layers to Doc’s fascination with Marie, who calculatingly provides Lola with the information that she lets Doc run his fingers through her hair. That’s not what this play is about, and the choice of Merkerson in this shattering portrayal deserves to be supported with a casting choice that does not distract from the heart of her troubled, painful story. Kevin Anderson is, it must be emphasized, in every way a solid portrayer of Doc.

If you allow that that misstep in casting, and do not calculate in the actual implications, you can witness a revival of searing engagement. Sheba may not come back, but it’s great that Epatha has let Lola return to the New York stage.

Tony Vellela, veteran Broadway correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, has also written for dozens of other publications, including Parade, Dramatics, USA Today, Rolling Stone, Emmy Magazine and The Saturday Review. He wrote and produced the documentary PBS series on theatre, “Character Studies.”

(Acknowledgement: these are the opinions those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Drama Book Shop.)

Come Back, Little Sheba By William Inge Mantattan Theatre Club
At the Biltmore Theater, 261 West 47th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200
Through March 16, 2008.

On our shelves now:
Come Back, Little Sheba
Acting Edition, $7.50

A Vote For Mamet’s New Comedy "November"

By Tony Vellela

The industry-wide penchant for pigeon-holing actors into the same type roles once they’ve had a success in something is widely practiced. Why can’t Broadway give us Marylouise Burke as Mary Tyrone? Wouldn’t Bernadette Peters really deliver the goods as one of Tennessee Williams’ tortured women? It’s called type-casting, and it unfairly limits what artists do, and audiences see.

But what do you call it when the same mentality is applied to writers … type-writing? A quick survey of the responses to David Mamet’s new play “November” reveals that this prejudice is applied to writers as well.

It’s not clear what Mamet’s ultimate objectives were when he conceived and crafted this comedy. What is clear is that it IS a comedy, and it succeeds on that level, because however much you resist, you will laugh, again and again.

The premise unfolds with the measured pace of the ceremonial red carpet being rolled out: an historically unpopular and incompetent sitting President, abandoned by his unidentified party as he seeks a second term, and lacking funds or friends, decides to make one last stand. His wife wants a Presidential Library, his chief-of-staff wants to make a clean exit, his speechwriter wants to marry her same-sex partner on national television, and he wants respect. Nathan Lane, as Mr. President Charles Smith, inflates and deflates with the hot air volume of a Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, dispensing offensive, stupid or vacuous remarks that verify why the country hates him – vintage Nathan, crisp and delectable. As the hapless spinmeister recently returned from China to pick up her newly-adopted daughter, Laurie Metcalf stays on message, loyal to the office, scornful of the man. And holding things down in the job of keeping things ever-so-tenuously under control is the stolid Dylan Baker, portraying the President’s Best Man, keeping the right words in his boss’s mouth, and the wrong words out of the public’s earshot. While Lane and Metcalf sparkle in their roles [her physical dexterity channels film and early television comedienne Joan Davis], it is Baker that is the unsung hero of this battle of wits. His unflinching focus on making things happen, or preventing them from exploding, gives all the tale-twisting frippery a much-needed whisper of plausibility.

As the story progresses, this day-in-the-life tale pulls in the luckless rep from the turkey industry [Ethan Phillips], there to officiate at the annual Thanksgiving Turkey Pardoning Ceremony, and slip the Pres fifty grand in cash for his ‘services.’ Sensing a gravy train, the Oval officers concoct a plan to fleece him and his organization of $200 million, enough to retire and stop the First Lady’s nagging about that Library no one else thinks is remotely warranted. The unexpected arrival of a casino-craving Indian with a blowgun [Michael Nichols] triggers the resolutions. But this is a grandchild of the screwball comedies of the ‘30s in terms of plot points – how DID Hepburn’s pet leopard get loose in ‘Bringing Up, Baby’ in the first place? A generation later, did you truly believe that the despairing half of “The Odd Couple,” Felix Unger, would actually kill himself? If you’re looking for logical connections and a real-life storyline, catch Tom Stoppard’s superb political psychodrama “Rock ‘n’ Roll” two blocks south.

Comparisons to Neil Simon and Saturday Night Live miss the true origins of this format, which Mamet has certainly mastered. In addition to Hollywood screwballers, the live comedy-variety television shows from the early ‘50s, and the programs featuring those comedy masters who migrated there from radio and vaudeville laid the groundwork for “November.” Yes, Neil Simon, but it was his work as a staff writer on Sid Caeser’s “Your Show of Shows” that honed his skills, and that program pioneered the form that led to SNL. [Remember, Nathan Lane played the Caesar-inspired character in Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” about his days on that show’s manic writing team.] We should not be expecting true political satire; it’s broad but somewhat timely comedy sketch material.

Imogene Coca, Caesar’s distaff foil, once told me that a key element in making all that zaniness work was whether the performers came across as believing in the premise, however wacky. And George Burns took great pains to make me realize that his wife, Gracie Allen, was not a comedienne, but a skilled, accomplished actress, who could portray her scramble-brained character with conviction. Mamet is blessed with first-rate acting talent all around, anchored by the often underappreciated Baker.

Mamet’s only failure here is an over-reliance on profanities, which quickly become obtrusive and arch instead of comic. When they puncture the gossamer glaze that tenuously holds together this confection, he invites comparisons to the abrasive, testosterone-fueled ‘Mamet’ style.

“November,” at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, centers on a President the country has judged [however correctly] in a certain light, and put him in a box. This comedy may be the playwright’s [certainly justifiable] attempt at breaking out of his own stylistic box. They both want to be thought of in a new way. The voters have yet to decide President Smith’s fate. Mamet chalks up a victory.

November Official Website

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Tony Vellela, veteran Broadway correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, has also written for dozens of other publications, including Parade, Dramatics, USA Today, Rolling Stone, Emmy Magazine and The Saturday Review. He wrote and produced the documentary PBS series on theatre, “Character Studies.”

(Acknowledgement: these are the opinions those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Drama Book Shop.)