I do not know if this Spike Lee directed filming of the New York Drama Critics winner for best musical from a year or two ago is even eligible for Oscars but it is quietly getting terrific reviews so I thought I'd focus some attention its way.
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
When I first saw “Passing Strange” on Broadway a little more than a year ago, I admired it, but with some reservations. This musical story of adolescent rebellion and artistic self-discovery, written by Stew (with music by him and Heidi Rodewald) from the raw material of Stew’s own life, simmered with energy and ideas, with sonic and verbal wit, but it also strained for a soaring, transcendent theatricality that it could not quite achieve. The show’s rootedness in the swerves and bumps of an individual biography struck me as admirable but also limiting, and its themes of creative ambition, racial identity and the search for that elusive thing called the real seemed to lie too heavily on the surface.
But here’s the strange thing. When I saw Spike Lee’s film adaptation, “Passing Strange: The Movie,” in effect a video recording of a performance identical to the one I’d witnessed at the Belasco Theater in 2008, I was blown away. Loose ends ceased to dangle; soft spots were smoothed away and slow passages tightened up. Some of this may lie in my own preference for the cognitive solitude of movie-watching over the self-conscious sociability of theatergoing, but Mr. Lee’s contribution, as well as that of the cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, should not be discounted.
Their camera movements and compositions immerse the viewer at once in the story and the process of performance, emphasizing both the play’s artifice and its fidelity to emotional facts. The members of the small cast, several of whom take on multiple roles, are shown in the full, sweaty glory of self-transformation. (The band, present onstage and led by Ms. Rodewald, works pretty hard too.) And as Stew, a stout man in a red shirt and a dark suit, narrates and comments on the doings and dreamings of his younger, angrier, thinner and similarly dressed self (the excellent Daniel Breaker), changes of angle and focus illuminate the emotional distance between hotheaded youth and rueful middle age.
The child, as Wordsworth said, is father of the man. Or, as Stew puts it, “adulthood is the consequence of decisions made by a teenager.” And while there is a measure of sad wisdom in this observation, and in the raised brows and weary headshakes with which Stew now reflects on Stew then, “Passing Strange” celebrates the same foolish, heedless passion that it mocks and sometimes regrets. The show does two contradictory things at once, both brilliantly: it captures the impatient emergence of a budding artistic personality with a perfect mixture of sympathy and skepticism, and also reckons the sometimes devastating costs of a young artist’s desire to set himself free and make himself real.
The quest for the real — a term whose proliferating connotations in the musical seem derived, in equal measure, from postmodern literary theory and from hip-hop — begins in Los Angeles in the 1970s. There our teenage hero (identified as Youth), living with a doting, not-quite-understanding mother (Eisa Davis), seeks an outlet for his disaffection as well as an escape route from a black middle-class social environment that strikes him as sterile and phony. What he finds are drugs, punk rock and an array of cultural touchstones that are pressed into his hand by Mr. Franklin, a church choir director for whom Europe is a magical land of promise and fulfillment.
Mr. Franklin (one of several characters played by Colman Domingo, a tall actor with extraordinary cheekbones and even more extraordinary vocal and physical control) fills young Stew’s head with exotic names — Camus! Godard! — and images of African-American exile glamour. Visions of James Baldwin and Josephine Baker in Paris lead the hero to Amsterdam, but not before he has, like Prince Hal rejecting Falstaff, pushed Mr. Franklin away.
And this act of casual cruelty establishes a pattern. Again and again the young man’s insistence on finding a new horizon of the real — or the “more than real” — causes him to turn away from a person who has brought him closer to that goal. After Mr. Franklin, there are women in Amsterdam and Berlin (played by Rebecca Naomi Jones and de’Adre Aziza, both terrific in these and a handful of other roles). Looming over all these abandonments is the mother whose plaintive calls interrupt Stew’s European journey even as her checks underwrite it.
Strip the story down to its essentials and you can find the not especially exceptional tale of a spoiled, privileged kid wandering through foreign capitals dabbling in legal drugs, sexual exploration, radical politics and avant-garde art. That this highly unflattering interpretation lingers around the edges of “Passing Strange” is a tribute to the musical’s good-natured, unassuming honesty. And it is Stew’s refusal to sentimentalize his life that makes him a trustworthy guide to it. But at the same time, his refusal to condescend to the desire to wrest art from experience, or to the crystallizations of that desire in Los Angeles garages or Berlin cabarets, makes “Passing Strange” moving, thrilling and new.
That and the music, a pastiche of styles given coherence by the rumble of Stew’s voice and the snarl and wail of his electric guitar. “Passing Strange” is less a collection of songs — though there are a few, most notably “Keys (Marianna),” that stand out — than a single headlong piece of music. You might say a rock opera, if that phrase did not summon up spectacles of bloated self-importance entirely antithetical to the spirit of this show. A show not simply preserved by Mr. Lee’s camera, but brought, somehow, to its fullest, strangest, most electrifying realization.
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A ***1/2 review from Peter Travers in ROLLING STONE...
In rethinking the Tony-winning 2008 rock musical Passing Strange for the screen, director Spike Lee made sure to do the right thing: not **** up what worked like gangbusters onstage. Lee and the masterful cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Iron Man, Inside Man) brought their HD cameras to Broadway's Belasco Theatre to film two live performances with the original cast. Then, for greater cinematic dynamism, they shot a performance without an audience, letting the cameras rock out in their own freewheeling dance. The invigorating result, zestily edited by Lee's own inside iron man, Barry Brown, is in every way a knockout.
But I can hear you asking, "What the hell is it?" The first person you need to know about is Stew. It's his life that gives Passing Strange its structure, its rhythm and its beating heart. Born Mark Stewart in Los Angeles, Stew, 48, made his name on guitar and doing vocals in a band called the Negro Problem. After performing in Europe and touring America, Stew teamed up with his then-girlfriend, bass player Heidi Rodewald, to write Passing Strange, a musical in which Stew, as narrator, confronts his younger self, winningly played by Daniel Breaker, as he leaves his churchgoing, comfortably middle-class mother (Eisa Davis, magnificent) in 1970s L.A. to find "the real" in the hash and hedonism of Amsterdam and the radical art politics of Berlin. His street cred in Europe comes from passing as an oppressed black man from the South Central projects. In a hilarious aside, Stew confides, "Ain't nobody on this stage from the projects." On stage and screen are a host of mesmerizing, multitasking talents, including Chad Goodridge, Colman Domingo and the electrifying De'Adre Aziza and Rebecca Naomi Jones as the women in this youth's life.
And permeating everything is that thrilling score in which rock, punk, funk and gospel conduct a revival meeting that blows the roof off. Stew's voice, which can twist from mellow to shout without missing a nuance, is a distinct pleasure. And the lyrics, whether evoking an Amsterdam where "men dressed up in Gauloise smoke quote Marx right back at you" or the pain of missing life while you're "working your wound," shame the usual Broadway treacle. As for Lee, he clearly relates to this material and the questions of political, musical and family identity he himself raised in films as diverse as Malcolm X, Mo' Better Blues and Crooklyn. You can feel his exhilaration directing Passing Strange. When Stew sings out, "Is it all right?" the answer for anyone seeing this powerhouse onscreen, on cable or later on DVD is easy: "Yeah, it's all right." And then some.
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A *** out of **** review from Lou Lumenick in THE NEW YORK POST...
SPIKE Lee's "Passing Strange: The Movie" is basically canned musical theater, but this is one Tony-winning Broadway show that's well worth preserving and seeing.
The singularly named Stew (formerly Mark Stewart) serves as the musical narrator for his rousing autobiographical show, which depicts his younger self (Daniel Breaker) fleeing Los Angeles, his long-suffering mother (Eisa Davis) and his church choir to find himself in Europe.
This search takes him to a druggy, ambisexual commune in Amsterdam and a radical artist collective in Berlin -- whose members are nevertheless bourgeois enough to spend the holidays with their families.
"Passing Strange" has a terrific rock score by Stew and Heidi Rodewald, who is part of the onstage band. Lee has taped the show's last two performances, and also separately staged close-ups and choreographed camera moves to make things more cinematic.
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by MysteriousRent: I am really excited to see this.
One of the reasons it may not be eligible for Oscars is I think it might be available ON DEMAND very soon and I am not sure what kind of lag it needs between theatrical release and showing up on TV to remain Oscar eligible.
I am not sure if you consider it going ON DEMAND good news or bad news but if it does show up I will be watching it immediately. As a Broadway nut I am excited.
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by MysteriousRent: I am really excited to see this.
One of the reasons it may not be eligible for Oscars is I think it might be available ON DEMAND very soon and I am not sure what kind of lag it needs between theatrical release and showing up on TV to remain Oscar eligible.
I am not sure if you consider it going ON DEMAND good news or bad news but if it does show up I will be watching it immediately. As a Broadway nut I am excited.
"Passing Strange" is one of the best musicals I've seen. It tells the story of a young black man from Los Angeles, rebelling against a loving, church-going family and breaking out on his own in the late 1960s to follow the call of art, or "art," to Amsterdam and Berlin. Starting with a garage band, he moves through psychedelic, punk and rock stages in a journey toward the meaning if life. But can that meaning be found in art? His life builds toward that question.
The music is moving and exciting not only because of book, music and performances, but because of its intelligence, passion and heart. A Tony Award-winner from the Public Theater and on Broadway, it has been filmed by Spike Lee, whose work is the very model of how to record a live performance.
This is the semi-autobiographical story of the rock musician Stew, who wrote the book and lyrics and is onstage throughout as the Narrator. He is surrounded by a gifted, high-energy cast, in a production which certainly works as a musical but also, particularly, as a drama. Often the story of a musical will be only a clothesline to hang the songs from. This story has depth and weight.
The hero is a young man known only as The Youth (Daniel Breaker), who when we meet him is being sent by his loving mother (Eisa Davis) to try out for a church choir. He joins after a comely choir member catches his eye, but church doesn't turn out as his mother intended. He samples pot for the first time under the tutelage of the pastor's son (Colman Domingo). The son, who calls himself a coward under his father's thumb, instills in The Youth a vision of Europe and its freedoms, art films and cafes, a refuge for such black American exiles as James Baldwin.
Once in Amsterdam, embraced (sometimes literally) by a more color-blind society, the Youth finds not only personal freedom but a new understanding of his own roots. The scenes in Holland and Germany are rich with satire of the times, as the hash bars of Amsterdam are replaced by the radicalism of Berlin. The Dutch and Germans are played with droll accents by the cast members De'Adre Aziza, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Chad Goodridge and Domingo, who with a few costume details and attitude changes effortlessly evoke three characters apiece.
Stew's lyrics, sometimes funny, sometimes edgy, come with a twist. Having warmed the fleshpots of Amsterdam, The Youth encounters a new kind of sex in Berlin. “Celibacy," he is informed by a female German erotic entrepreneur, "is the only sane response to a world gone wild. My porno films feature fully clothed men making business deals.”
The hero feels he has embarked on a new kind of life in the Old World, and when entreated by his mother to come home for Christmas, he hems and haws and says that "maybe after" his next show he can "start thinking about" visiting home. Her song advises him "don't forget your own people." And indeed, he poses as culturally much "blacker" in Europe than he really is, because it works for him. It's as foretold by the preacher's son: "We're blacks passing as blacks."
This progress from youthful rebellion to eventual disillusionment and a search for deeper meaning is one that Stew himself possibly made. Today a 48-year-old guitarist, studiously non-hip, he transforms himself with his guitar into the whole catalogue of musical poses, but emerges as a man who has learned something. Toward the end he makes this devastating observation: "Some of us spend our entire adult lives acting on the decisions of a teenager."
Spike Lee attended the opening night of "Passing Strange" at the Public, determined to film it, and shot at several performances at the Belasco Theater on Broadway, including closing night. With great skill and craft, he allows the material to speak for itself. He uses several cameras for many simultaneous angles, and with his editor, Barry Alexander Brown, seamlessly composes close-ups and longer shots to convey both character emotion and the exuberance of the choreography.
I can't single out a performance. This is a superb ensemble, conveying hat joy actors feel when hey know they're good in good material. This is not a traditional feature, but it's one of Spike Lee's best films. IFC Films is launching it on its new multi-media platform. It opens Aug. 21 in New York, then goes out via Video on Demand on Aug. 26, on cable outlets. A DVD will follow eventually.
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by MysteriousRent: I am really excited to see this.
One of the reasons it may not be eligible for Oscars is I think it might be available ON DEMAND very soon and I am not sure what kind of lag it needs between theatrical release and showing up on TV to remain Oscar eligible.
I am not sure if you consider it going ON DEMAND good news or bad news but if it does show up I will be watching it immediately. As a Broadway nut I am excited.
Not overly concerned about it being stagebound?
It is a general problem that when you film theatrical performances they often seem over-the-top with the cameras doing close-ups when the actors are playing to the rafters. Still, I have not read this complaint in any reviews so I am not overly concerned. Maybe the fact that this is a more intimate, concert style show has kept it from having that problem.
Also, I do own some tapings of Broadway shows ("Passion", "Into the Woods", "Sweeney Todd", "Company", "Pippin"- a few more) and even though almost all suffer from the problem discussed above, more or less, I am glad they have been taped so I can watch shows I did not get to see on Broadway.
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
By Christy Lemire updated 4:06 p.m. MT, Wed., Aug 19, 2009
LOS ANGELES - It’s easy to see why Spike Lee was drawn to Stew, the one-named musician and mastermind behind the Broadway production “Passing Strange.”
Like Lee, the artist formerly known as Mark Stewart possesses a powerful and singular voice, one he uses to express vividly his own unique experience of growing up as a black man in America. And Lee has always shown a strong affinity with music in his films, as evidenced by his longtime collaboration with composer and jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard.
In bringing Stew’s show to the screen as “Passing Strange The Movie,” Lee took the wise and uncharacteristic step of staying out of the way — of letting the songs and the story play out without inserting his own trademark aesthetics into them. (“Passing Strange” won the Tony last year for best book of a musical and earned six other nominations. The movie version will play theatrically in New York starting Friday, then will be available nationwide through video-on-demand starting Aug. 26.)
Lee shot two performances at New York’s Belasco Theatre before the show’s close — including the emotional finale — then shot it again without an audience to capture close-ups, include dolly shots. The result is so crisp and intimate, it makes you feel as if you’re right on the minimalist stage with Stew (who also narrates), the rest of his formidable cast and the band. Similar to Jonathan Demme’s concert film “Neil Young: Heart of Gold,” the cameras stay focused almost entirely on the performers, except for a few times you see the packed and rousing house in the background.
Matthew Libatique, the cinematographer behind several of Lee’s recent films including “Inside Man,” lets you see every facial expression and bead of sweat — and even a few tears. The film is also edited (by another frequent Lee collaborator, Barry Brown) with a natural energy and fluidity, which enhances the vibrancy of the material.
The semi-autobiographical “Passing Strange” tells the story of a black Los Angeles teenager, known as Youth (Daniel Breaker), who struggles to find his artistic identity in the 1970s. Among the forces that shape him are his churchgoing mother (Eisa Davis) and the bohemian misfits he meets in Amsterdam and Berlin (De’Adre Aziza, Colman Domingo, Chad Goodridge and Rebecca Naomi Jones in multiple roles).
The coming-of age tale may sound familiar and the self-serious debates about creativity can grow repetitive. But the powerful and catchy rock, blues and gospel songs (co-written by singer and bassist Heidi Rodewald), along with Stew’s humorously pointed observations about race, make “Passing Strange” compelling and often moving.
Besides trying to figure out who he is, Youth also has a complicated relationship with his blackness. He was raised middle class, safely surrounded by love, but when he travels to Europe and immerses himself in sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, he starts to think he doesn’t have enough of a tortured past from which to create true art, so he affects a ghetto persona.
“I am bleeding sunshine,” he half sings, half recites. “I am emptying my veins.”
As Stew points out, no one on this stage knows what it’s like to hustle on the mean streets of South Central — one of many times he talks directly to his characters or to the audience.
His words — both spoken and sung, on stage and on screen — ring out loud and clear.
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Spike Lee's Passing Strange on Film By Scott Foundas
For those (like this critic) who missed singer-songwriter Stew's Tony-winning, autobiographical rock musical during its runs at the Public Theater and on Broadway, Spike Lee's concert-film version—taped during the show's final two performances at the Belasco Theater, and once more before Lee's army of craning, swooshing cameras—provides a richly satisfying record.
Appearing center-stage, flanked by a trio of backing musicians, the regal Stew (né Mark Stewart) serves as narrator and interlocutor for this Proustian journey into the irretrievable past, centered on a restless African-American teen (known only as "Youth" and played superbly by Daniel Breaker) coming of age in South Central L.A. in the 1970s. Chafing at the clichés of urban black identity and desperate for "real" experience, Stew's musically minded alter ego sets sail for Europe, where he gets a crash course in a whole new set of clichés, discovering sex and drugs in Amsterdam and joining a radical collective in Berlin. At every step, the "real" rips through the Youth's—to say nothing of Rent's—idealized notions of la vie bohème, and our hero finds himself faced with the conundrum of Sondheim's Georges Seurat: to make love or art.
Nimbly directed by Lee and propelled by a rousing cabaret rock score (by Stew and Heidi Rodewald) that cleanses the palate of contemporary Broadway's prevailing jukebox drivel, Passing Strange conjures a rare kind of theatrical magic with its emotionally raw, frequently euphoric portrait of the artist as a young man.
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A positive review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE...
Passing Strange. The Broadway rock opera by Stew (just Stew) and Heidi Rodewald is captured on film by Spike Lee, who sells the material hard but doesn’t, for once, interpose himself. A full-throttle onstage band and a singing narrator (Stew again) chart the journey of an African-American youth called, uh, Youth (Daniel Breaker) as he searches for fulfillment—first with his mama (Eisa Davis) on the south side of L.A. (via church gospel, then rock and roll), then in Amsterdam (sex, drugs), then in Berlin (anti-bourgeois rants), then back home, always leaving people who love him behind. The first act is camp, but as the various artistic philosophies accumulate, something magical happens: This musical about the evolution of an artist becomes a metaphor for itself. When Stew (who’s Youth grown up) lectures his younger self that life is “a mistake that only art can correct,” the show’s reason for being couldn’t be more crystalline. The cutting is hyperkinetic, yet Lee is always in synch with the cast’s phenomenal energy. He’s in their thrall—and so are we.
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A short *** review from THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS...
The Broadway musical "Passing Strange" earned at least ten major awards last year. Feel bad about missing it? Well, thank Spike Lee for another chance.
More observer than participant, an admiring Lee captured the final performances so everyone could see this unusually open-hearted exploration of artistic, cultural, and personal expression. Singer-songwriter Stew narrates his autobiographical story, in which an African-American teen (Daniel Breaker) rebels against family and tries to find himself in 1970s Europe.
The beginning is awkwardly earnest, but the play matures considerably while retaining its youthful energy and enthusiasm. In fact, you'll probably have to resist the urge to stand up and cheer with the onscreen audience during the emotional curtain call.
Elizabeth Weitzman
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Adapted from the Tony-winning Broadway production of the same name, this filmed performance of Passing Strange is a worthy public record of a show most people nationwide didn't get the chance to see. Shot during the musical's closing night, with additional scenes filmed in the days immediately following, it might inspire jealousy in anyone unable to have caught it on the Great White Way, especially since this semi-autobiographical tale about a young black musician and his vivid travels from middle-class South Central to the artistic free zones of Amsterdam and Berlin isn't your standard-issue musical theater; it's like watching a rock concert or a gospel revival.
The narrator and composer, Stew, has a touch of the rock star in his being, but also a bit of the pulpit minister, the unreliable biographer who doubles back on himself and his own shortcomings. Standing there with his five-person band in the center of the stage, he's a winning and captivating presence right from the get-go, leading us through the story as the minimalist theater space is transformed into various guises—starting with a pious, stiflingly all-American Los Angeles with vague undercurrents of casual, almost chaste drug use under the surface. Playing Stew as a young man, Daniel Breaker conveys the ambition, ideals, and naïve selfishness that comes with the pursuit of "the real" (and Stew, who remains on stage for the entire show, winks and winces empathetically at the pretensions of his younger self).
It's a bit of a slow start as the character grapples with his mommy issues, but by the time the story shifts to the drug-fueled bacchanalia of Amsterdam and the various fleeting romances our hero has there, followed by a stint in Berlin where he redefines himself for the politically charged, artistically tenacious, and borderline humorless German art scene as an "angry black man from the ghetto," Passing Strange has woven itself into a rock 'n roll memory walk—a touching story about a confused young man who tells lies about himself, and ultimately forgets himself, in an attempt to find his identity. It's a complex web, where the line between personal freedom and wearing a mask to hide one's true face becomes a soul-crushing blur.
Thematically deep and musically strong, Passing Strange is the kind of show that makes you want to get on your feet, jump around and make noise, but never allows showy spectacle to get in the way of a surprisingly rich character portrait. When the show explodes into music, the audience responds fully, which unfortunately can't translate into the movie-watching experience, where we remain passive. Director Spike Lee mostly films the action at the ground level, simply trying to recreate the experience of the show, but sometimes gets in his own way by trying to spice up the images with gratuitous crane shots and overheads that swoop over the actors. It's a distracting bit of razzle-dazzle for a show that already does that on its own.
If Passing Strange has any major shortcoming, it's that it never feels like it's meant for the screen (and unlike, say, Stop Making Sense, it doesn't get transformed into a full cinematic experience), but that shouldn't prevent you from vicariously experiencing the magic of a really good, smart, engaging piece of filmed theater. When the narrator and his surrogate self reach a moment of mutual epiphany at the end, combined with more than a little self-loathing, it's as poignant a moment as any we'll see at the movies this year.
Posts: 27185 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by MysteriousRent: I am really excited to see this.
One of the reasons it may not be eligible for Oscars is I think it might be available ON DEMAND very soon and I am not sure what kind of lag it needs between theatrical release and showing up on TV to remain Oscar eligible.
I am not sure if you consider it going ON DEMAND good news or bad news but if it does show up I will be watching it immediately. As a Broadway nut I am excited.
Not overly concerned about it being stagebound?
It is a general problem that when you film theatrical performances they often seem over-the-top with the cameras doing close-ups when the actors are playing to the rafters. Still, I have not read this complaint in any reviews so I am not overly concerned. Maybe the fact that this is a more intimate, concert style show has kept it from having that problem.
Also, I do own some tapings of Broadway shows ("Passion", "Into the Woods", "Sweeney Todd", "Company", "Pippin"- a few more) and even though almost all suffer from the problem discussed above, more or less, I am glad they have been taped so I can watch shows I did not get to see on Broadway.
I feel the same way. If it is a filmed version of the production, I don't mind that it will feel stagy - that is what it is. It gives me a chance to see something that I never would have otherwise, since I don't really expect Passing Strange to be a major force on the touring circuit. It's hard to judge something like I expect this to be as a film, but it is still something I definitely want to see.
It is particularly interesting to me that while Spike Lee's traditional film output has been pretty bad for years, but a filmed version of a Broadway musical and a documentary (When The Levees Broke) in recent years have gotten him some of the best reviews of his career.
