Passing Strange
A rock ’n’ roll autobiography of an artist in search of himself, “Passing Strange” is bursting at the seams with melodic songs, and it features a handful of theatrical performances to treasure... Call it a rock concert with a story to tell, trimmed with a lot of great jokes. Or call it a sprawling work of performance art, complete with angry rants and scary drag queens. Call it whatever you want, really. I’ll just call it wonderful, and a welcome anomaly on Broadway, which can use all the vigorous new artistic blood it can get.
Charles Isherwood, New York Times
Not since Stephen Sondheim introduced a kind of Jewish skepticism and irony to the Broadway musical, in the nineteen-fifties, and Tony Kushner revolved his 2003 show, “Caroline, or Change,” around the ways in which class intersects with race have we had such a finely crafted, ethnic-minded American musical as “Passing Strange”
“Passing Strange,” [is] a work of such singularity that it prompts comparisons less to traditional theatre than to the eccentric iconoclasm of the producer Prince Paul, who, in works like his 1999 hip-hop opera, “A Prince Among Thieves,” ushered in the sound of the New Negro. Whether he knows it or not, Stew has picked up the baton.
Hilton Als, The New Yorker
Notes of a
Native Song
The singer and songwriter Stew pays homage to the great African-American writer and activist James Baldwin in “Notes of a Native Song,” a song cycle adorned with some casual commentary and video — or, as Stew puts it in a program note, “just a bunch of songs with banter in between.”
The show is really a celebration of Baldwin’s legacy as an inspiration for artists to create their own work that, like his, defies genres and expectations. In that Stew has certainly succeeded.
Charles Isherwood, New York Times
It wasn’t until he read Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain” — first at 15 and again in his late 50s — did Stew realize just how much his life was affected by the writer... when he reread the book, “it was like spiritual copyright infringement. I could not believe how much I had digested that he became so much a part of my artistic DNA without me even realizing it.
The show — a mash-up of songs, speech and visuals — traverses genres, including glam rock, jazz and rhythm and blues. All the while, Stew provides commentary about themes Baldwin is known for — race, love, pain and politics — and that are present in the book from which the show borrows its name.
Tre’vell Anderson, Los Angeles Times
The Total Bent
A singing preacher and his singing son go mano-a-mano, or rather microphone-to-microphone, in “The Total Bent,” a blazingly entertaining new musical set mostly during the 1960s.
Playing the preacher is the vibrant Vondie Curtis Hall, who seems to shine with a righteous light when he sings. And as his son, Ato Blankson-Wood gives a breakout performance of wry wit and musical intensity. Portraying a gay young man who moves from composing songs for his father to composing them for himself, he transforms before our eyes from a rebellious boy fiddling with a recording console into a live-wire performer, half Tina Turner, half Mick Jagger and all strutting bravado and androgynous sex appeal.
“The Total Bent” keeps you hooked through the surging power of its sensational score, which blends elements of the blues, gospel, funk and throbbing guitar-driven rock. At its best, “The Total Bent” feels more like an ecstatic combination of revival meeting and rock concert.
Charles Isherwood, New York Times
Wagner, Max! Wagner!
Richard Wagner and the Blues? Commissioned by The Kennedy Center in honor of Wagner’s 200th birthday in 2013, Wagner, Max! Wagner! takes these two opposing musical genres and gleefully collages them with song, poetry, spoken word, and video art... the result is anything but ridiculous.
…The biggest hypothesis set forward is that both Wagner and the Blues are so tethered to their respective unsavory histories that it can be difficult to separate the popular mythology from the actual music…
Stew says that he originally began writing a piece that tried to undo this psychology by separating the myths and histories from the music...In the course of working on the piece however, he discovered it simply wasn’t possible, because the history is not just collective memory, it is stored in the music itself…
…The strength of Stew & The Wagner Problem lies in their blatant juxtapositions. Wagner, Max! Wagner! examines these numerous contradictions not by smoothing them over, but by shouting them out... A work-in-progress that will be different each night, as the musicians improvise, develop, and experiment on stage. With so much to learn with every new iteration, you’ll wish you could see it three or four times.
Anne Donnelly, DC Metro
Family Album
“Family Album,” Stew and Rodewald’s latest collaboration, created with director Joanna Settle for the world premiere at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, confirms that for sheer lyrical ingenuity and contemporary music vitality this duo is top of the musical theater line. Mixing rock and soul with a dash of punk and a dollop of hipster folk, their new score insinuates its way into your body, releasing its joy and making it impossible to remain still.
“Family Album” is about the close and often confounding ties of band members in the middle of their careers. It’s about the way they configure and reconfigure themselves into a family — as dysfunctional as any other — as sexual love morphs into a more durable bond and fatigue sets in after so many years of chasing the dream on the road.
Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times
As in “Passing Strange,” the divisions between song and story in “Family Album” are appealingly blurry. The performers carry instruments around much of the time, and the show has a fluid vibe that marries the loose, improvisatory ambience of a rock concert with a traditional book musical. Although Stew’s portraits of middle-aged rockers and upscale married-with-kid Brooklynites are drawn with wit, it’s the terrific songs that keep the show airborne.
Charles Isherwood, The New York Times
Brooklyn Omnibus
Brooklyn is too big to grasp and always in flux. Like the universe, it is unknowable, and yet we keep trying to figure it out. Brooklyn started us thinking about how strongly people identify with neighborhoods and the pleasures and dangers of that. As Californians, we are far less tribal than East Coast people; we were fascinated by that. There was also a very American ahistorical thread I became obsessed with—the idea that people can identify so strongly with an area culturally and racially that may have been populated by a completely different culture/race just 15 years before. — Stew
Stew joins his band The Negro Problem and co-creator Heidi Rodewald for an irreverent, genre-bending song cycle that considers what it means to call Brooklyn home. With a swaggering score and a raw, unvarnished lyricism, Brooklyn OMNIBUS refracts the Kings County experience through a surreal prism of disparate characters, all living in a nomadic place where the neighborhood is a tribe, the self is an ever-changing storefront, and home is an elusive refuge resting somewhere between.
Brooklyn OMNIBUS premiered as part of Next Wave Festival 2010 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.