Passing Strange is most definitely a musical , but it’s not like any musical I have ever seen before – and what a thrill it is. Pulsing with electric guitars and drums – it’s not for nothing that the band takes centre stage, while the actors weave around them – it’s far more akin to a gig with a story than a conventional show with songs. Stew Stewart and Heidi Rodewald’s work played originally at the groundbreaking off-Broadway Public Theater in New York, so it is highly fitting that this fresh production is mounted at the Young Vic, the Public’s London spiritual twin in classy experimentalism.
Giles Terera, in another firecracker of a performance after his career-shaping turn in Hamilton , is our Narrator, singing and playing the guitar (and at one point a fierce drums as well) as he unfolds the impressionistic story of Youth (Keenan Munn-Francis). Youth, we quickly realise, is Narrator’s younger self, a young man frustrated by the comfortable prison of his middle-class black life in LA and yearning for something more profound. “Instead of trying to find yourself, why don’t you try to find a job?” remarks someone archly, but Youth remains determined to move to Europe to pursue his musical dreams .
His first group in LA, a punk band called The Scaryotypes, breaks up when the other members opt for conventional jobs, so off Youth decides to head, to Amsterdam. “At this point in the play, we were planning an upbeat showtune,” says Terera puckishly, be.
