Passing Strange – Young Vic Theatre

Giles Terera (centre) and the company of Passing Strange at the Young Vic Theatre, London. Picture: Marc Brenner

Passing Strange continues at the Young Vic Theatre, London until 6 July 2024.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

When it hit Broadway in 2008, Passing Strange was subtitled “The Stew Musical”, maybe hoping to capitalise on the name recognition of Mark Lamar Stewart (‘Stew’). The founder of the acclaimed band The Negro Problem writes the book and lyrics for this rock musical, co-writing the music with Heidi Rodewald.

It’s also a semi-autobiographical tale of Stew’s life, narrated by the onstage band’s leading man (Giles Terera, taking on the role played by Stew himself on Broadway). We’re slowly introduced to the narrator’s younger self – never referenced by name, and credited as ‘Youth’ – starting out as a teenager to a single mother (Rachel Adedeji) in South Central Los Angeles in the mid-1970s.

After being dragged to church by his mother, Keenan Munn-Francis’ Youth has a revelation – not of God, but of the music. Youth recognises that the Baptist church’s hymns share a common heritage in the blues with that more profane musical style, rock‘n’roll, and that sends him on an odyssey to find himself through music.

Initially staged by director Liesl Tommy as a rock band performance, with Terera front and centre and the other four musicians dotted around designer Ben Stones’ triangular set, it initially takes a while for Youth’s story to take hold. Like many stories with a narrator, we’re held apart from the central characters by this other force who is telling, rather than showing, us the story.

So it’s a slow burn as Youth encounters the people who come to shape his life, from the closeted church choir master, Mr Franklin (Caleb Roberts) who shares pot with his charges and regales them with his dreams of visiting Europe, to the other outsiders in the youth choir with whom Youth sets up a truly terrible garage punk band.

Throughout, there’s a theme of “passing”, as hinted at by the musical’s Shakespeare-derived title. The concept is first introduced in a story of how Youth’s grandmother was pale-skinned enough to “pass” as white. But Franklin is passing too, a pastor’s son who must pass as both straight and upright.

There is a sense, too, that what Youth seeks in his music is a constructed form of reality. Art and life are not the same, and whichever one chooses means assuming a patina of artifice, passing oneself off as someone one step away from who one is inside.

That’s explored more as Youth travels to Europe, first joining a squatters’ commune in Amsterdam and then, in Act II, a Berlin-based performance art collective. To the latter, he plays down what we in the UK would call his middle-class roots (his mother is a successful real estate agent), instead passing himself off as coming from the ghetto.

These periods of the play flirt with pastiche – the Amsterdam segments have the air of Hair or Godspell in their portrayal of free love hippies, while in Berlin there’s more than a passing resemblance to Kander and Ebb’s own influences, albeit with a more modern punk aesthetic. Roberts’ turn as performance artist Mr Venus is scene-stealing in every sense, but it’s the sweetness of Renée Lamb as Desi, a collective member with whom Youth finds himself falling in love, that really resonates. It is a pity that, musically, her character reinforces the bluesy, rock‘n’roll sound of Youth’s origins rather than something that reflects her own character.

But all these interactions do influence Youth’s, and particularly the Narrator’s sound. There is a very soulful, 1970s-but-timeless quality to the music that puts one in mind of Labi Siffre’s albums from that decade, never settling on one specific genre or subgenre. It helps that Terera’s vocal timbre has the same sense of thoughtful tenderness as Siffre, too.

Throughout, Adedeji is isolated from the rest of the musical’s action. That may be true and necessary to the story, but it leaves us, and her, shortchanged. There is a reunion of sorts at the end as Youth and the Narrator come to resolve their feelings, but it leaves one yearning for Adedeji to have had more to do throughout.

At least by the time of that finale, the slow approach to connecting with Youth is a distant memory. Munn-Francis’ performance is infectiously joyful – but it’s Terera that steals the show. His narrator has a twinkly irreverence that helps propel Passing Strange throughout. With him at the helm the whole evening just sings.

Scott Matthewman