Stew of The Negro Problem: Passing Strange

I will probably go see the Broadway incarnation, I have a discount email for $22 balcony tix...

He's already won for best book at the Tonys

lolz I was just about to post something about this

I just remember first hearing about him and the Negro Problem back in the mid-nineties or so. Kinda lumped in with the 'Silverlake scene' as such, which covered a variety of mostly nonentities. (Anyone remember Touchcandy? No? GOOD.)

Other thread here FWIW:

even though there's a black guy fronting the band why do i still feel like an asshole when i namedrop the negro problem?

has anybody here seen Passing Strange? did Dr. Morbs ever go?

Anyway I love his reaction:

"Yeah, yeah. Um. Yeah," said the almost speechless performer, who did not expect awards to be given out so early. "I thought this would happen an hour from now. I was looking for some M&Ms in my pocket."

He said that he and his team created the project on an "organic" level. "We dealt with this play like a kid or a good meal," he said.

i keep meaning to see this. one of my classmates RAVES about it... another hated it... i have been more interested in their terribly ineffective ad campaign, though...

Broadway Recast!
Onstage and in the Seats, People of Color Are Showing Producers New Ways to See Green

A Washington Post article on "In the Heights," and "Passing Strange" and other recent efforts.

By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 15, 2008; Page M01

You don't know me

And I don't know you

So let's cut to the chase

My name is Stew

I'll be narrating this gig so just sit tight

-- "Passing Strange"

"Every single day I wake up in the morning saying, 'What are we doing here?' " says Stew, who co-wrote "Passing Strange" with musical partner Heidi Rodewald. "We never thought this would happen. . . . Not only did we not think we were going to Broadway, we didn't want to go to Broadway."

more from the Wiltz article in the W. Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR2008061202259_4.html?sid=ST2008061302292

He's sitting in his pre-show joint, a brasserie across from the Belasco. He's a round, bald brother sporting the accoutrements of the downtown hipster: funky glasses, porkpie hat, Converse sneaks. As he saw it, Broadway was hardly the place for a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story about a middle-class black kid who finds himself making music in Europe -- "a downtown kind of weird, intellectual play," a hard-rocking musical with references to Camus and James Baldwin, Godard and Buddhism.

As opposed to "In the Heights," which incorporates modern-day rhythms within the traditional Broadway musical, "Passing Strange" annihilates Broadway conventions. The music is undiluted rock; the actors are African Americans playing multiple characters of varying races and nationalities. (The cast members worked with dialect coaches to ensure they had the nuances of Dutch and German accents.)

Stew says he insisted on making art how he saw fit -- which meant, he says, that he fought with the producers at every turn.

"They can't force us to do anything. Nobody has to sell out here. . . . Only artists who wimp out change their script. All a Broadway producer can do is close the show.

"This is like an experiment every night. To see if this weird curio can exist in a mass audience. I really look at it as a science experiment. Every night."

Astroturfy and crepey.

Ha

i kinda want to see this

It's good, fwiw. Better than any other musical I've seen live; which limits it to about twenty (and five or so in the past three years), but still good.

we saw the closing night ( a few weeks back) filmed by spike lee for upcoming movie. OMG it was apocalyptic. words fail me here. like I don't even want to hear stew's other stuff now cause it couldn't be as good as this. and LOUD as fuck, my sensitive-eared son was practically in tears (but he survived). totally worked on every level both as theatre and rock&roll. stew's narration was brilliant he works those raised eyebrows like a pro.

really a shame. i think this was horribly promoted. i never got to seeing it :-\

At least there will be the movie, though -- looking forward to it.

saw the spike lee cut of the play tonight (closing night of TFF) - kicking myself so hard for not seeing this on b'way, this was fucking awesome

was v. pleased to see that he reworked a couple of his older songs for this too, and that they all pretty much worked beautifully in the context of the play. it's a strange musical - i'm not surprised it had a brief run, the lyrics and the situations they describe are fairly oblique, at least as far as musicals go, and while it's incredibly entertaining (and occasionally really, really hilarious) i think it's dealing with these very complex issues of race and art and identity and the interplay between all of them. tehresa's comments about the terrible promotion don't surprise me because this seems like kind of a difficult thing to market!

and given that the first time i saw stew perform was in a dive bar in asbury park i am really just incredibly thrilled that this even got off the ground at all. and the film looks great, spike lee was kind of the perfect choice for a director here i think (it's mostly shot on video, but incorporating some 16mm film in key spots)

uh...unfinished thought there. "and the interplay between all of them in a way that i could see as maybe offputting (or just uninteresting) to some people"

limited opening tomorrow. a Spike Lee film that even Armond White likes! (tho Spike "adds little")

http://www.nypress.com/article-20224-he-got-class.html

Finally saw the Lee joint, a few too many closeups when a wide shot would've done more, but certainly among the 15 or so best "films" I've seen this year. A "real movie" adap seems to be in the works, too? Will be a different animal.

hey glad to hear about this! picked up a copy of negro problem's post-minstrel syndrome once upon a time and kinda liked it, kinda didn't, but really liked what it implied and was shooting for. got rid of it somewhere along the line, but i've occasionally since wondered what stew might be up to. and now i know.

he's been winning Tony awards!

the DVDs come out Jan 12, available for preorder on Amazon right before the PBS broadcast on Jan 13

as of a cpl months back the spike lee film was available on demand, not sure if it is still up but here is the old info,
BRIGHT HOUSE: Movies on Demand > IFC In Theaters
CABLEVISION: Movies On Demand > Independent Films > Sundance Selects
COMCAST: Channel 1>Movies & Events > Same Day as Theaters > Sundance Selects
COX: Channel 1 > Movies On Demand > Sundance Selects
TIME WARNER: Movies On Demand> IFC In Theaters

yes, PBS tonight.

I'll be DVRing it. Love this guy, The Naked Dutch Painter should have been on my decade list.

YES. so great. i love very nearly everything he's done.

Wow.

Aww, I forgot this was on last night. Will have to fgure out from PBS listings when it will be on again, although I see some excerpts are online.

I think it's on at 1am tonight?

i loved the original production to death. it was a fantastic piece of theater. saw the movie for the first time last night on pbs and had a hard time getting into the actual performance because i was distracted by the intense close-ups of the beads of sweat forming on the actors' faces, and other things you're probably not supposed to see when you're actually in the audience. i was equally distracted by camera angles that put me onstage, sometimes in the middle of the actors, sometimes behind them. i yearned for a perspective that might not be possible in what is literally a film of a stage musical. maybe i just yearned to see the musical again. i eventually decided it was a fascinating, real-time documentary about what it's like to perform on a broadway stage.

i remember the music having an actual live rock and roll quality onstage -- loud guitars, vocals sometimes struggling to be heard over the music, etc. the movie mixed it a lot more conventionally, which was a bummer.

this just popped up on my netflix streaming recommendations. seeing "2009" "musical" and "spike lee" seemed really odd, but after reading this thread it makes sense. didn't really know anything about stew or the negro problem but now i feel like i need to see it.

Okay, this is beautiful:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2010/09/stew-and-the-negro-problem-to-perform-in-la-for-the-first-time-in-five-years.html

Please note the first comment in response. Hero.

New record "Making It" is beautiful and perfect and harder-rocking than they've done in a few years...and the breakup songs are so depressing I don't think I can actually listen to it more than a couple more times ever. Then again it's Sunday afternoon and the sun is going down.

Saw him do an interesting talk/conversation at the Library of Congress last night. Someone from the DC theatrical company Studio Theatre asked him questions and he sang songs while playing his acoustic guitar. he explained his songwriting method, how he got into theatre and did Passing Strange, how he got into teaching MFA students, his upcoming projects (one on the 1968 Poor People's March to DC), and he talked about fave music, film, and theatre. Re music, he mentioned Bill Withers, Lou Reed and others, but noted his love for James Brown, Beatles and Dylan (and he sneered at the music on radio these days. Sounded a bit too old man cranky with that).

I liked the story about and the acoustic rendition he did of "Black Men Ski." His number about Park Slope Brooklyn women pushing fancy strollers while talking on iphones was a bit light and novelty-ish. He closed with an impressive fairly new tune called (I think) "Florida You are Killing Me" that started light and funny; said other than Cuban food Florida offered nothing and then got real serious re "your hanging chads and lynched boys"). Impassioned soulful delivery on this tune

he sneered at the music on radio these days

has ears

But that just over-encouraged some of the late 50s and up folks in the q and a part after to get all baby boom classic rock worshipful

Saw his new production "Wagner, Max! Wagner" at the Kennedy Center. He and his Passing Strange co-writer Heidi Rodewald (she palyed bass) plus a band with horns, sitar, strings doing wordy songs about loving Wagner's music while trying to come to grips with Wagner's anti-Semitism. Plus another theme about blues, and per Stew, African-American embarrassment about the blues because of its historical roots. He combined these with a song about Wagner's blues. I don't know Wagner's music or life, so some of this was way over my head.

Afterwards Stew talked about classical music but with soul and jazz analogies, comparing either Mozart or Beethoven to Marvin Gaye and someone else to Coltrane. Plus asserting that the only music one can't play loud on a Sunday morning without offending someone is Wagner.

While not all the themes came together for me (and some lyrics in both English and German were garbled in his fervent delivery), I love Stew's punky-pop guitar playing and clever melodies

Part of the blues schtick didn't work too well...Jokes and songs meant to tie this theme with the Wagner one about how the production was really about obscure (made-up) bluesman Big Dick Wagner and not the famous Wagner. A couple of 12 bar blues clichéd songs...

he's got a new musical (him and Heidi Rodewald, that is) at the Public Theatre in May

http://www.publictheater.org/Tickets/Calendar/PlayDetailsCollection/1516/The-Total-Bent/?SiteTheme=JoesPub

hopefully the blues aspects will be done better than the ones he did in the Wagner thing

Listening to his Notes of a Native Song album now. Clever and entertaining lyrics, with sometimes enjoyable music.

You say you got mad pains, maybe you should listen to Bad Brains

That’s a light lyric but he’s got more complex ones about serious subjects. I like the bitter sweet melancholy part of “Brave Knave”