by James Wilkinson
‘Passing Strange’ – Book and Lyrics by Stew. Music By Stew and Heidi Rodewald. Created in collaboration with Annie Dorsen. Directed by Arthur Gomez. Associate Director: Regine Vital. Music Director: Julius LaFlamme. Associate Music Director: David Freeman Coleman. Set Designer: Lindsay Fuori. Lighting Designer: Aja M. Jackson. Choreographer: Elmer Martinez. Costume Design: Chelsea Kerl. Sound Design: James Cannon. Props Design: Michelle Sparks. Presented by Moonbox Productions at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, December 10, 2021-January 1, 2021.
It’s all about the atmosphere here. That’s the vibe you get when you walk into Moonbox Productions’ Passing Strange and the stage is awash in electric blue light. The performance space is devoid of furniture, the musicians haven’t yet taken their places on the side, but the theater already has a crisp glow to it. Get ready. Musicals as an artform tend to veer toward the bombastic. Even for supposedly intimate chamber pieces, it’s all about getting to that moment when mere dialogue doesn’t do the emotions justice and the songs explode out of the characters diaphragms. Passing Strange is working on a different wave length. It’s not that the show lacks big musical moments that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, (they’re here and they rip), it’s that it gets to those moments in a much more circuitous way. Moonbox’s production is one that you slide right into and it feels as lived-in as a memoir. Everything we witness is through the eyes of our lead character; we’re practically under his skin.
We’ve seen this story before, maybe even some of us have lived it. A young wannabe artist, full of ideals, packs his bag and flees home. He’s in search of his authentic artistic voice, convinced that he’ll be able to find it somewhere out there in the wider world. The idea that it might come from within his home community seems unthinkable. The walls around him only represent barriers for him to break through. It’s a tale old enough that you can set your watch by it, but Stew, the creator behind the musical (he wrote the book and lyrics, and co-authored the music with Heidi Rodewald), blasts the dust off the narrative by zeroing in on its specificity. Stew played the tale’s narrator in the original Broadway production, and it’s ostensibly his life that we’re watching him reflect on. There isn’t the same connection in Moonbox’s production, no one (so far as I know), is literally providing their own life story for consumption. But the increased distance from the material isn’t a hinderance, it’s an advantage. It allows the team to approach the story for the grand myth that it is rather than as strict autobiography.
Director Arthur Gomez has a wonderfully loose approach with the material. It’s as though he’s managed to find a way to give shape to water. Passing Strange is always on the move, going from one location to another as the characters glide across the European continent, but we don’t get lost in a haze of shapeshifting. Rather, every location feels particular, like we’re flipping through a photograph album of our own youthful exploits. And the whole thing is wrapped in a mood of intimacy that Gomez sustains throughout the evening. Passing Strange is a wordy musical, but even if the sound mixing drops out for a moment, (which it did a few times on the night I saw the show), you don’t miss the lines you didn’t hear. You’re too busy drinking in the rich atmosphere of the show. Gomez and his acting team understand just how much our personalities get shaped by small moments we experience while growing up. It’s there that we start to truly step inside of our personhood. It’s in those late-night conversations in parked cars with friends we perhaps only knew for a year or two; in those meetings with the community figures who stand tall in our memories for the freedom from conformity they represented; in those brave little moments where our teenage selves first start to assert the kinds of ideas our parents back home wouldn’t approve of. Gomez takes the care to give these moments in the story weight and although they may pass fleetingly, their reverberations are felt throughout the evening.
The acting team seems intent on packing in as many delights and surprises as they can. As the protagonist at the heart of the story, Ivan C. Walks turns in a performance that holds back on revealing just how good it is. Walks is in the tricky position of playing someone who spends much of the show reacting to the world around him. When the character does make choices, it’s often to put on a persona, another identity for him to slip on for a bit, (It’s telling that the script identifies him merely as “Youth,” he’s not a full person. Not yet). But Walks doesn’t fall into the trap of playing him as a wide-eyed innocent, gaping at everything around him. He’s got a smile that conveys a warm and intelligent curiosity and he puts it to work for him. At choice moments in the show, a physical energy seems to erupt out Walks’ limbs. It’s no wonder that his character falls in love with the European art scenes that he drifts into. With the excitement it generates in his body, how could he not?
Walks’ doppelganger is Davron S. Monroe, playing the older version of the character who also narrates the tale. Again, Monroe is playing a part that could easily be seen as more narrative device than flesh and blood human being, but he’s got the charisma to pull it off. Crossing the stage in skinny jeans, a leather jacket and a cocked fedora, he injects enough natural swagger into the character to hold the stage. (The costume work by designer Chelsea Kerl is tremendous. A few well-chosen accessories by her do the character-building equivalent of thirty minutes of dialogue.). Elsewhere, Maria Hendricks gets comparatively less stage time playing Mother, but she makes it count. If there’s a gripe to be had with the narrative, it may be in how it uses her character towards the end. But Hendricks wipes away those complaints by damn near breaking your heart in a late scene with little more than a furrow in her brow and a rising tension in her voice.
I know better than anyone how much of a challenge it can be to get an audience to the theater during the cold nights of winter. As those temperatures drop and the sky turns pitch black by five o’clock, that Netflix queue increases in appeal for those searching for an evening’s entertainment. But those who venture out to Moonbox’s production will find themselves rewarded for their troubles. The theater is warm, the actors are raring to go and the air is waiting for that first thrum of the guitar that starts the show. Who’d want to be anywhere else?
For tickets and more information, visit their website: www.moonbox.org
