Passing Strange
Cover Story
Passing Strange
The new musical generating the most buzz on Broadway this season is Passing Strange. The show features a full rock band on stage, and it’s been hailed as a mold-breaking entry into the musical form, but don’t call Passing Strange a “rock musical.” It’s a term that Stew, the show’s author and narrator, and his songwriting partner Heidi Rodewald, both of Local 802 (New York City), want to keep far from this production. They’ve worked too long and too hard to have this show reduced to a single phrase, especially one so touchy in the theater world.
Stew, previously known as Mark Stewart, is at the center of Passing Strange, now playing at the Belasco Theatre, acting as narrator and lead singer for the onstage band. He demonstrates a laid-back personality and delivers witty and incisive speeches, frequently commenting on the actors’ dialogue and actions. But he says he’s not an actor; instead, he’s a veteran rock musician, and he and Rodewald have played together in the group The Negro Problem since the late 1990s. Putting a rock show on Broadway means taking a risk. “It’s as crazy as trying to go into a dive rock bar and wanting to read Hamlet and expecting everyone to shut up,” Stew says. It has also meant making some adjustments in terms of audience.
“Sometimes those matinees can be tough,” he says. “It’s hard to train them in the space of two and a half hours to respond the way a rock and roll crowd responds.”
Winning Over the Crowd
Stew often opens the show with a shout: “How’s everybody doing?” But unlike in a club, a theater audience is less likely to yell back. Still, Stew, the backing band, and the cast work hard to win them over. “We try hard to get them, and sometimes we try to seduce them into it, and sometimes we let them do whatever they want and see if they figure it out.”
The goal for him, and the rest of the cast, is to make the show different every night. The camaraderie that the band, composed of Local 802 members Jon Spurney on keyboards, Christian Gibbs on guitar and keyboards, Rodewald on bass, and Christian Cassan on drums, has developed allows for spontaneity and interaction. The ideal of a “tight” band, one that keeps time and plays well together, doesn’t have to be at odds with staying loose.
“We knew we wanted to have the band involved in a big way,” Stew says. “This is a band onstage, we’re not invisible pit orchestra musicians.”
“Every rehearsal, we’re coming up with things,” Rodewald says. “It’s really personality driven, and that’s what bands are all about.”
The show follows a character called Youth as he comes of age and tries to make a career as a musician, uprooting himself from Los Angeles and roving about Europe. Youth is loosely based on Stew’s own life, but he feels comfortable putting his own words into other people’s mouths. “I feel like he’s playing a character that’s a composite of a lot of people,” he says. “I’ve been doing it since 2004 now—writing for actors’ voices in addition to my own—and I find it a relief and kind of an addiction.”
Partners in Art
After working together for years on tours and recording sessions, Stew and Rodewald have developed a close, if sometimes contentious, relationship.
“I’m very collaborative, but at the same time, nobody writes the way I’m going to write,” Stew says.
“I would never step in and say ‘here’s my song’,” adds Rodewald. “When we need something, I can come up with something else. I’m just part of the whole thing.”
When current director Annie Dorsen and the onstage cast teamed up with Stew and Rodewald during the show’s 2006 run at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California, it added a new dynamic.
“We have a pretty weird, unique process, from what I’ve been told,” Stew says. “The three of us all collectively work with the script, and nobody treats the script like it’s this precious article of mine. We treat it like it just fell from the sky.”
“I have to keep remembering: I’m a person in a band,” says Rodewald, who sings backing vocals throughout the show and interjects one spoken line into the show’s second act. “I’m not a Broadway actor. I’m not competing with them.”
The show’s main themes—the search for identity, the struggle for authenticity, cutting ties with the past only to rediscover it later—are a natural outgrowth from Stew’s offstage songwriting, honed since his teenage years in Los Angeles. “I write in my head; I don’t carry around a guitar,” he says. “When the song’s finished in my head, I just find whatever instrument’s around. It comes from being on a lot of buses in L.A. and waiting for buses.”
From Coast to Coast
Rodewald, like Stew, is a California native, and sharing some of the same common ground from the West Coast is the basis for their bond. According to Stew, they both listened to the same radio stations and attended some of the some rock-and-roll clubs as they gained an education in both mainstream and underground music in the 1970s and 1980s.
“She’s one of the few musicians whom I simply trust,” Stew says of Rodewald. “I trust her aesthetics to the point where I can leave the studio for a few hours, or half a day, and I know that when I come back, whatever song we were working on she’s going to do something that I’m going to like.”
Though Stew acts as bandleader, he is often busy narrating and working with the actors, so Rodewald has the job of conductor for the onstage band—a role that requires a lot of trust in itself.
“My conducting is looking at [drummer] Christian Cassan and saying ‘Why are you going so fast?’,” Rodewald says. “We all have to kind of try and lock it in.”
The current band was assembled for the show’s run at New York’s Public Theater in 2007, and the chemistry they’ve developed has allowed them to take risks and function as a cohesive unit.
“I think we made up this play in the same way bands tend to make up songs, where someone brings an idea, and you sit there, and you jam,” Stew says, adding, “only we were jamming with actors.”
Stew describes a “give-and-take” process that shaped the show’s balance between precisely timed cues and a free-form, rock-show style. “I think what happened with this band is that the rock band learned a certain kind of precision from the actors, and the actors ended up being looser from the band,” he says. “We have to keep this fresh every night. It can’t be canned, ever.”
Entering a New World
After belonging to Local 47 (Los Angeles), Stew and Rodewald joined Local 802 before Passing Strange played at the Public Theater.
“When things started getting serious, that’s when I joined,” Stew says. “I think it’s really cool to be part of this large group that’s going to protect you and that’s going to have your back. I’m totally proud to be a union member.”
After frequent touring appearances in New York City over the years, Stew and Rodewald plan to make the city their base of operations.
“It was exciting to walk in and join, and to be on Broadway,” Rodewald says. “We spend enough time where I feel like I live here.”
Stew’s roots in the city go back to the early 1980s; at one point, he lived just a few blocks from the heart of the theater district, and he recalls it as a kind of foreign country. “I’d be walking home from somewhere after those Broadway shows were closed, and I’d think ‘What are they doing there?’,” he says. “It just seemed so foreign to me, a different world. I was living right there and I never went, and now I know what they’re doing.” Though the action in the show leaps from L.A. to Europe, Stew acknowledges that his time in New York helped to spur him on to his European experiences.
The hybrid nature of Passing Strange, blending rock music with musical theater, has proved intensely exciting for both the cast and the audience, and Stew hopes to maintain that energy throughout the show’s run and into his work in the future.
“I think I want to take what we’ve learned in the theater and see about bringing some of that back to the rock stage, and seeing if we can keep this hybrid going, but in the other direction,” he says. “I’m really anxious to get back into clubs, or maybe small theaters, where we can keep the hybrid of rock and theater going and keep exploring it.”
During April, the cast recording of Passing Strange took place in front of a live audience, rather than in a studio. It’s just another example of the spontaneous approach that has fueled its success. “I love it because I don’t know what’s going to come out of it,” Stew says.
