HotReview.org Editor's
Picks
Shows Worth Seeing:
Passing Strange
By Stew and Heidi Rodewald
Belasco Theatre
111 W. 44th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
Rock-and-roll and the stage musical toyed
with the prospect of marriage in the late 1960s and early 70s
(Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair), but inertia and
paralyzing nostalgia on both their parts ensured that the knot
was never securely tied and commitment would be on-again, off-again.
Lately, the heat seems to be on again, as a string of new shows
over the past few years beginning with Spring Awakening
suggests that good rock songwriters are turning to theater, possibly
as an alternative delivery-vehicle in a time of music-industry
crisis. Passing Strange, a collaboration between the
singer-songwriter Stew and Heidi Rodewald, is not so much a coupling
as a group hookup involving theater, rock, blues, punk, gospel
and few other musical genres I've no doubt forgotten. The show
stars the genial and casual Stew as a narrator-emcee who sings,
plays guitar and presides over a story about a young musician
named Youth (Stew's alter ego) breaking out of his stifling middle-class
L.A. home and lighting out to find the "real" in Amsterdam and
Berlin. Four crack musicians share the stage with Stew, playing
from shallow pits on each side, and a half dozen superb actors
give searing life to the coming-of-age story, muting its clichés
with their fine-tuned specificity and spicing it up with a few
dead-on satires. There are at least five or six splendid songs
in the show but also a few clinkers. The truth is that Stew can't
write all the styles he experiments with here equally well, but
strangely enough, that doesn't matter much in the end because
the Youth's search for his musical self is so charming, and the
whole play is so infused with Stew's sweet decency and self-conscious
humor. I wasn't sure when I left the theater whether I had just
seen a thin story superimposed on a bizarrely disparate album
of pop songs or a substantial play of self-discovery cleverly
made to fit the far less exacting narrative expectations of the
pop song. Either way, it's a delightfully strange fusion that
pumps welcome new blood into the musical.
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In the Heights
By Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes
Richard Rodgers Theatre
226 W. 46th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
Like Passing Strange,
In the Heights has been widely labeled a rock musical
for lack of any other genre to fit it into, but it's actually
a fascinatingly complicated mixture. Salsa, rap, tango and numerous
other Latin-inspired idioms whose energy has not been tapped sufficiently
in musicals all compete for air as the show goes about defining
a particular neighborhood, Washington Heights, through a frenetic
blend of music and dance. Nothing in the story about neighborhood
characters dreaming of "getting out" rings of originality or even
freshness. In fact, the main plot premise--that Stanford would
summarily yank the scholarship of a Latina freshman because her
grades dropped due to holding down two jobs--is flatly preposterous.
The appeal of the show is in its supercharged energy, the way
it moves from one sizzling tempo to another, using the flimsiest
of excuses to set the marvelously athletic cast pumping, bumping
and writhing. There's something relentless about it, but that's
very clearly the point. You get breathless just watching because
the music and dance have accomplished what the dopey sentimental
story couldn't: they send you grasping for the fleeting pulse
of youth and dreaming of a spirit of renewal that cannot be cheapened
by mawkishness. The streetwise choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler
and the firecracker music by Lin-Manuel Miranda are the true stars
of the evening.
