Passing Strange

Young Vic | ★★★✩✩

Reviewed by John Nathan

The term musicalised play is sometimes useful to describe a show in which the narrative figures more prominently than the music. However, this Tony-winning show from New York might best be described as a storified musical.

In his first appearance in the genre since starring in the UK version of Hamilton, Giles Terera takes on the role originally played by the show’s author and (with Heidi Rodewald) composer who goes by the single name of Stew.

With electric guitar and microphone in hand, Terera is excellent as the show’s Narrator who relates Stew’s autobiographical rites-of passage story of an artist who grew up in Los Angeles’s South Central neighbourhood in the 1970s.

Giles Terera (centre) and the company of Passing Strange at Young Vic. (Photo: Marc Brenner)

This son of a conservative mother (if the father’s absence was explained, I missed it) he decides while high on hallucinogenic drugs that the only way he can truly be himself is to reject the small ‘c’ conservatism of his home town and strike out to transgressive, experimental Europe.

In Amsterdam he discovers free love and in Berlin revolutionary performance art. Meanwhile, his mother (Rachel Adedeji) is now a you-never-call/write/visit presence on the end of the phone.

With an excellent four-piece band on stage and a score that has a rock drive almost as impressive as the musical version of Spring Awakening, there is a lot to enjoy here. Yet although this UK cast is excellent – the voice of Keenan Munn-Francis has the crackle of Prince and Terera’s can be as mellow as Nat King Cole’s – the absence of the show’s originator on stage bleeds the evening of authenticity.

And although European culture might feel well observed to American audiences, this side of the pond it comes across how I imagine a simplistic European impressions of America might appear to audiences stateside. Still, the music is excellent and the series of bit-part cameos performed by Caleb Roberts, who previously played Ike in the Tina Turner musical and was superb as the Prince in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ill-fated Cinderella, are an unexpected joy.