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, before trailing off playfully with “We don’t know how to write those kinds of tunes”. Passing Strange delights in toying with our expectations and casually breaking the fourth wall when it fancies, and Liesl Tommy’s tremendously self-assured production pulls it all off with conviction and panache.
Stewart and Rodewald offer a kaleidoscope of musical styles, which often arrive in beguiling fragments and slivers rather than entire songs. Refrains highlight key moments in Youth’s emotional journey; in the number “Welcome to Amsterdam”, the repeated line “She gave him her keys” underlines the easy friendliness of this new place after the coldness of LA. Yet life in Amsterdam becomes too easy and Youth is struggling to write his songs, so off he moves to Berlin in search of fresh inspiration. Back home Mother (Rachel Adedeji) wonders when she might next see her wandering son.
A young person’s yearning for creative self-expression has long been the plot motor of much drama and fiction, and Passing Strange’s fresh spin on this idea is both rousing and refreshing. Is Youth in danger of believing that art is more important than life? After all, the notion of home and family doesn’t appear quite such a hideously bourgeois construct when you’re left all by yourself in a foreign country on Christmas Day.
At Young Vic, London to 6 July (020 7922 2922, youngvic.org)