Passing Strange – Reviews Round-up

"Giles Terera’s charming, refreshingly unwoke journey of self-discovery"

"This Tony award-winning musical is so wildly, and often loudly, offbeat that there’s never a dull moment"

"Passing Strange is so wildly, and often loudly, offbeat that there’s never a dull moment. Presented as an amplifier-filled “gig-theatre” happening, with the musicians embedded among the cast, and projected video adding to a sense of concert-going dynamism, it comically mines a subject of abiding fascination: that youthful questing period when the world lies before you and you want to make sense of it while grappling with the riddle of your identity."

"The songs – shrugging off hip-hop expectations, and embracing indie-rock – may hurtle in one ear and out the other. But there are ambushing truths: after he’s invited to stay in a squat in Amsterdam, the song Keys rousingly encapsulates the way, when you’re young, a small gesture of generosity can have a life-changing impact."

"... its non-judgemental, good-humoured aspect reminds you of that more recent past, before selfies, social media and social justice took mindless hold. Not revelatory, perhaps, but invigoratingly strange, and bittersweet."

"An all-out wild ride of a rock musical"

"Giles Terera is sublime as the guitar-wielding musician looking back on his tearaway years in this rowdy production"

"You can’t take your eyes off him. The script for this autobiography of an artist isn’t always nuanced but Giles Terera as its narrator is sublime, filling every line with the weight of time passed, every move with the knowledge of mistakes made. And he has a cracking turn on the electric guitar."

"Terera holds the stage with his buzzing energy, cueing and quietening the band with a tiny flick of his wrist, as if he’s choosing which snippets of his life he wants to listen to again. With musical direction from Jerome van den Berghe, the band are beautifully balanced, fluidly part of the cast"

"The outrageous is where this show soars. Stew’s lyrics are at their most interesting when they are ambitiously strange and witty, allowing the cast to go all out."

"Passing Strange is unlike any musical I’ve seen before"

"Giles Terera stars in a show that's more like a gig with a story than a conventional show with songs - and what a thrill it is"

"Passing Strange is most definitely a musical, but it’s not like any musical I have ever seen before – and what a thrill it is. Pulsing with electric guitars and drums – it’s not for nothing that the band takes centre stage, while the actors weave around them – it’s far more akin to a gig with a story than a conventional show with songs."

"Giles Terera, in another firecracker of a performance after his career-shaping turn in Hamilton"

"Passing Strange delights in toying with our expectations and casually breaking the fourth wall when it fancies, and Liesl Tommy’s tremendously self-assured production pulls it all off with conviction and panache."

"A young person’s yearning for creative self-expression has long been the plot motor of much drama and fiction, and Passing Strange’s fresh spin on this idea is both rousing and refreshing."

"A joyous, shape-shifting musical odyssey"

"Singer-songwriter Stew’s gloriously indefinable show about a young man’s journey opens at the Young Vic, London"

"Passing Strange, written by American singer-songwriter Stew (with music by Stew and Heidi Rodewald) and shown on Broadway in 2008, is no regular musical. Rather it’s a joyous, gloriously indefinable, shape-shifting show, splicing gig, theatre, cabaret and wicked pastiche to tell the story of a young artist on a musical odyssey in search of his true self."

"One of its most endearing tactics is to send itself up."

"Coming-of-age is scarcely a novel storyline, but here it has a winning combination of mischief and sincerity, together with a sharp ear for musical styles. Tartly funny observation of the worst excesses of artistic navel-gazing travel hand-in-hand with a heartfelt, genuine search for what it means to be Black and an artist in late 20th-century America."

"It’s over-extended, sags in the middle and gets a little lost in its own entrails. But this is still a terrific show, laced with a mix of buzzing, funny and moving songs, staged with zinging wit by Liesl Tommy and performed by a superb, tireless cast (David Albury, Nadia Violet Johnson, Renée Lamb, Caleb Roberts) and band."

"I’d happily see this musical again tomorrow"

"There’s nothing else quite like the Young Vic’s vivid coming-of-age show about a young man’s quest for authenticity"

"The glory of Passing Strange — a Broadway import self-styled enough to have taken 16 years to reach London — is that it is a vivid tale of a young man’s search for authenticity that knows authenticity is both liberation and bunkum. Pitched between rock gig and musical, memoir and performance art, it’s musical theatre that even those who don’t like musical theatre can love. It’s satirical, stirring, tuneful, tender, awkward, alive."

"It’s alive even though Stew, the single-named singer-songwriter who played himself in the original, is now played by Giles Terera. Handily, Terera (Aaron Burr in Hamilton) is an exceptional actor and singer who unfussily owns the role."

"... the show taps into the need to find new orthodoxies to shelter in as you set yourself free. It understands and mocks the need to be “real”. Big ideas, but Liesl Tommy’s virtuosic production makes it all flow with a ragged ease."

"A Broadway musical’s European premiere rocks but doesn’t soar"

"There are nimble slides in the lyrics: “a melody for every malady” and a beautifully relaxed, melodious performance from Giles (Hamilton) Terera. Yet the production never quite lands its art vs life message, while insistently making it. Overamplified music makes the evening boom but not soar."

"A rock-gig musical with undeniable verve and brio"

"This fondly ironic coming-of-age story has style and swagger, but lacks a bit in the substance department"

"Style and swagger mask a lack of substance in this semi-autobiographical 2008 rock-gig musical from American writer-musician Stew, about a young black man trying to find himself as a person and an artist."

"Set out baldly, this sounds like the most ghastly, adolescent self-mythologising. In performance, it’s a lot more fun. The musicians noodle on a wedge-shaped stage, bare apart from some scraps of furniture, lots of amps and two rear video screens, as we walk in."

"For all its exuberance and its preoccupation with self-expression, this is a strangely insular show. We learn nothing about the Youth beyond his inner struggles and most characters are two-dimensional and OTT. It works thanks to the elevating performances of Munn-Francis (including a hectic, desperate tap-dance) and the three female cast members: Johnson and Renée Lamb as his girlfriends and Rachel Adedeji as his mother."

"Giles Terera is excellent in this enjoyably different if palpably self-regarding musical coming-of-age story"

"This 2008 Tony Award-winning, semi-autobiographical rock musical swaggers onto the Young Vic’s main stage in a blaze of colour and sound and with a hefty wink at the audience, as it makes its belated European debut."

"Liesel Tommy’s staging of the show has charisma to spare, as the rest of the ensemble cast move seamlessly around the four-strong, on-stage band whose banter with the Narrator provides a playful undernote to Stew’s almost novelistic script. Terera is the lynchpin here, tying emotional loose ends together with effortless dexterity."

"... it explores, sometimes thrillingly, a philosophical landscape of identity, belonging and finding meaning in art to a – literal – drumbeat. And yet it’s quietly – but persistently – undermined by a sardonic tone that never quite succeeds as much as you’re willing it to in places."

"This production wants to have its cake and eat it, expecting us to laugh at everything, but to take its own brand of earnestness seriously. Still, when the emotional beats hit their mark, they do so powerfully and lyrically."

"Anthemic songs and a script full of zingers"

"In Liesl Tommy’s gig theatre production at the Young Vic the Hamilton veteran Giles Terera charms as a strutting, self-aware guitar hero"

"If this show were a rock album it would be a triple-disc set with a psychedelic sleeve depicting hipsters crowned with Afros and Mohicans. And, as with all triple albums, it would contain a few songs you wouldn’t want to hear more than once. In Liesl Tommy’s gig theatre production, though, the best of them stay rattling around in your brain, thanks in part to the sheer exuberance of the performances."

"From the moment he [Giles Terera] winks at us after firing off his first blues-rock lick we are at his mercy."

"One reason you warm to Terera’s narrator is he understands that his younger self — known as Youth, and played with brio by Keenan Munn-Francis — is playing games with race."

"It helps that the cast are quite capable of crashing through the fourth wall and joshing with the audience. And Stewart’s script contains zingers... It’s just a shame that the show runs out of ideas in the second half and turns mawkish at the end. Until then, it’s a blast."

"Compelling but self-indulgent"

"Giles Terera dazzles in this otherwise soulless autobiographical musical about making art"

"Even with all the focus on his creative endeavours, we never get a sense of who the Youth is. Why does he feel such a pull to music? We see his naivety, but in the end, does he regret his decisions? The show only skims the surface."

"Still, with Giles Terera in the central role, it compels. In his first musical role since Hamilton, Terera once again proves himself to be one of Britain’s most versatile actors working today, with charismatic confidence and a voice as sumptuous as ever."