Passing Strange | Live Show Review – TOP 20 MUSICALS 2024: NO 9

Sixteen years after it became an unexpected Broadway phenomenon, Passing Strange has crossed the Atlantic in a production that is even more electric than the New York original first seen at the Public Theater downtown – the one-time home of Hamilton, not to mention A Chorus Line, which reaches London afresh in July. 

How appropriate, therefore, that its current iteration should boast Hamilton’s Olivier Award-winning Aaron Burr, Giles Terera, in a career-best performance as an itinerant music-maker who makes his way from America to Europe, transforming himself, and his audience, in the process.

If anything, the funky, ever-chilled Young Vic seems a more fitting home for the show than your conventional Broadway house, even if Passing Strange did score seven Tony nominations in 2008, winning for co-creator (and original leading man) Stew’s book. As much gig theatre as anything resembling what one might expect from a conventional musical, the show feels in London like the sort of giddy, unclassifiable entertainment you might find yourself drifting into after hours, perhaps even in the funkier corners of Berlin – where much of the musical is set. 

A blissful Terera here inherits Stew’s role as, well, some version of Stew, which is to say a man who makes of his life an artistic and personal quest that takes him from 1970s South Central LA over the ocean to Amsterdam – where, we’re told, ‘all vices [are] in full view’ – and ultimately to the German capital. 

‘Life is passing me by,’ he says, some while before realising that he can take occupancy of life by acquiring a sense of self. The show couples self-revelations with song sets of differing kinds that put notions of Blackness centre stage. All roads ultimately converge in Berlin in the sort of full-throated, full-throttle head-on embrace of music-making that our wandering hero – unsure whether his younger self should ‘Blacken up a bit’ – will come to think of as home. ‘Life is a mistake that only art can correct,’ we’re informed near the end – an assertion so immediately moving that I’ve made a separate note of it elsewhere. 

The authorial conceit of the show is to have our narrator-guide look on at a younger version of himself, a separate character called Youth who roams the alluring expanse of Ben Stones’s recording studio-style set as he leaves his churchgoing past behind and discovers women – and drugs. 

Amsterdam is the locale for a tremendous song about keys sung with ineffable beauty by Marianna (a radiant Nadia Violet Johnson), Youth’s love interest at the time. Gravitas comes with the politicisation accompanying our picaresque wanderer’s onward passage to Berlin, by which point he has fully left behind a punkish band called the Scaryotypes in favour of something more truly soulful, even savage. 

The material requires musicianship in its defining roles, and Terera impresses both on guitar and drums, his voice relaxing into the Stew-Heidi Rodewald score with an easeful joy at some remove from the nervy energy he brought to Hamilton. Those wanting a set narrative with numbers that advance the action should look elsewhere; Passing Strange owes its seductive power to a sense that it is somehow being spontaneously assembled in front of our eyes, though the trick of the director Liesl Tommy’s production is to allow its considerable stage smarts to seem like they are happening off the cuff. 

Watching the ace four-person band, for instance, you get the impression that they could very possibly jam through the night, and on that point, it’s been some while since I’ve seen an audience so reluctant to leave the theatre. 

The production represents a triumph for the South African-born Tommy, who made history in 2016 as the first woman of colour to be nominated for a Tony for direction of a play – Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, that brought Lupita Nyong’o to the Broadway stage. That Gurira herself wrote a play, The Convert, done to acclaim at the Young Vic in 2019, helps anchor the presence of Passing Strange here: whatever else is said about the legacy of Kwame Kwei-Armah when he steps down as this venue’s leader in due course, his expansive approach to the American repertoire has been remarkable – and so, for that matter, is Passing Strange.

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Cast Giles Terera, Keenan Munn-Francis, Rachel Adedeji, Caleb Roberts, Simone Robinson, David Albury, Renée Lamb, Nadia Violet Johnson, Brandon Lee Sears, Stephenson Ardern-Sodje et al

Direction Liesl Tommy

Choreography Dickson Mbi

Musical supervision Brandon Michael Nase

Set, costumes Ben Stones

Lighting Richard Howell

Sound Tom Gibbons

Video Will Duke