From February 20 through March 11, New York's Public Theater and Los Angeles playwright, musician, filmmaker, and multi-talented performing artist Stew will be in residence at Stanford work-shopping his new musical, Passing Strange.
Written by Stew and collaborator Heidi Rodewald, directed and developed by Annie Dorsen, and choreographed by Karole Armitage, Passing Strange is a theatrical work-in-progress “about a young man's emergence out of an incurious black middle-class world and his subsequent journey through various promised-land bohemias en route to an elusive sense of belonging.”
Stew's residency launches Creative Risks, a new series bringing ground-breaking contemporary artists to Stanford to develop new works and participate in diverse campus-wide activities and workshops.
Stew's new work-in-progress, Passing Strange, is being performed March 10 and 11, and is a multi-disciplinary ensemble rock musical that tells the terrifying, yet hilarious story of a youth loosely based on Stew, with strong echoes of the experiences of legendary expatriates such as Josephine Baker and James Baldwin. Passing Strange draws from Stew's Los Angeles beginnings and a journey that took him from there to Europe, back to Los Angeles and beyond. The show filters the time-honored cabaret tradition of the “musical travelogue” through the black bohemian perspective in a way that manages to be both formally daring and completely accessible.