One of the few original musicals unleashed on Broadway in recent years — and one that will also be available in a DVD version filmed by Spike Lee — Passing Strange chronicles the life of a young musician who flees his stifling suburban Los Angeles environs to find himself and explore his musical artistry in Amsterdam and Berlin.
The show, staged at the Belasco Theatre, tackles themes of love, identity, alienation and redemption. It stars Stew, the charismatic and charming singer-songwriter of the group The Negro Problem, who relives his coming-of-age adventures through his younger self, played by Daniel Breaker. Stew co-wrote the show with his longtime band mate Heidi Rodewald, with whom he also plays in an “Afro-Baroque cabaret ensemble,” also called Stew.
Veteran stage designer David Korins, who has worked off-Broadway (Jack Goes Boating and Spalding Gray: Stories Left To Tell), on Broadway (Bridge and Tunnel and the new Godspell) and at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park (Hamlet), immersed himself in designing a production with five musicians, seven actors and a giant light wall onstage. An added challenge was that the musicians were onstage all the time, as were most of the actors, and Stew also narrated the entire show and even interacted with his younger self.
“We talked about this show for a really, really long time and didn’t have any way to crack it,” says Korins. “Every time we started to storyboard the play we didn’t know where to put the band onstage because the band wrote this thing. It wasn’t like they were an orchestra pit band that was brought on to the project. Stew and Heidi not only lived but wrote it. You can’t throw Heidi underground in the orchestra pit where most of the bands on Broadway are. So for us, the way in was when the director said to me, ‘I want this to be a show in which you basically layer a music track over an acting track over a dancing track over a singing track, and they need to coexist happily. One thing shouldn’t pull focus more than the other thing.’”
Korins came up with the idea of placing each of the other musicians — Rodewald (stage left), guitarist/keyboardist Christian Gibbs (upstage, back to the audience), keyboardist Jon Spurney (stage right) and drummer Christian Cassan (downstage, behind Stew) — on individual “pods” that could be lowered partially below stage level. They acted as individual orchestra pits for the band, whose members could still see one another and interact with the actors during a few key moments. The ability to raise and lower the musicians was essential to the show.
“There’s a moment in the show where Heidi has a bass solo and sings a couple of verses herself, and we raise her up,” says Korins. “That’s a nice dynamic to be able to control. There’s something about watching a band play together, especially a small rock band, not like an orchestra. At the top of the show they just sit down and jam like a band would, and then we actually are going to put together a theatrical evening. When they lower down in the pits they become more of a classic version of an orchestra. But it was important that we start the show off by saying, ‘Hey, this is a rock show.’ It was really important to get that dynamic.”
Beyond setting up the musicians, the look of Passing Strange was essential in setting the tone and creating an atmosphere appropriate for each of the show’s three main locales, particularly as stage props were minimal. “We knew that the play traveled from Los Angeles to Amsterdam to Berlin and back to L.A., had multiple locations and needed to be supported visually but not with realistic scenery,” explains Korins. “We knew we weren’t going to do ‘sets’. It needed to be more like a rock show. Nothing works better on stage for a rock show than light, as far as how to get from location to location, and nothing is more seamless than fading from one light bulb to another. As far as the color saturation and the time of day, nothing could articulate it as cleanly visually as light. We unlocked the physical space and the way that the band would relate to the performers and vice versa, so then it was about the backdrop and what could be an amazing emotional barometer and place setter for us. And the back wall was born.”
Korins brought in lighting designer Kevin Adams, who, besides having a photography and set design background, is an avid rock ‘n’ roll fan. Adams revisited Bob Fosse’s 1972 concert film about Liza Minnelli called Liza with a ‘Z’ and suggested that Korins check it out. The set designer felt that despite being a period piece, it still looked fresh and contemporary.
“We looked at it and literally light bulbs went off in our heads,” recalls Korins. “It essentially follows the A-B-A structure visually. It starts with a curtain of sorts that is painted with this beautiful, Rothko-esque thing where you can’t really tell where the sources of light are coming from, and then in part two it reveals itself to be a gridwork of very old-fashioned lighting units that are like scoop lights pointing at this fabric. It reveals itself to be making the lighting sculpture in the first act, and we wondered what would happen if we made that but with 2008 lighting fixtures. What would happen if we completely updated this thing and made it totally modern? It was one of those really beautiful confluences of scenic and lighting design coming together.”
What resulted was a high wall that is initially covered by a black curtain, but through which various lights of different shapes and sizes shine through to help set the mood for Stew’s teenage years in L.A. before he journeys to Europe. “The light that you see on that curtain is being thrown at it from the front and from the back. It’s a translucent, very diffusive piece of fabric,” remarks Korins. “But it’s difficult for someone who’s not that knowledgeable about lighting design to figure out what the source is and how it’s working. We were using the fixtures on the wall very sparely to make polka dots or smears or single lines of sources, and when we reveal we basically show you everything that’s been working on the thing one at a time. When we reveal it we turn it on all at once.”
The curtain rushes open, and underneath lies an asymmetrical wall with different types of lights of various colors and shapes that help to create the heady vibe of Amsterdam. An outer wall featuring rows of white fluorescent lights, which represent the colder, more fascistic feeling of Cold War-era Berlin, later consume and cover most of the first wall. Korins and Adams spent a lot of time testing different shapes and fixtures on the wall, and moved many of them around, to see what worked best for the layout.
“Kevin started with a color palette,” says Korins. “We actually started the show in Berkeley, Calif., and at first we actually had a lot of colors on the wall that we wound up taking off almost immediately. There were a lot more purples and a lot more greens, and it felt a little candy store, so we wound up really trying to more clearly define the color palette for each location. We knew that Amsterdam was going to be saturated with oranges and yellows, and we knew the Berlin was going to be a lot of white light, and we then started to pare away all the stuff that we didn’t need color- wise.”
The set designer notes that Passing Strange’s light wall layout is asymmetrical within a symmetrical framework. The wall and the space are completely symmetrical, with a vertical green line and horizontal blue line that section off the wall into quarters. But within that framework there is an asymmetrical layout. Korins adds that the directive for the lighting and set design partially stemmed from a comment made to him by director and collaborator Annie Dorsen.
“She said to me, ‘This design needs to feel completely inevitable and yet surprising’,” he says. “So when you walk into the space and see those band platforms up, you think that the band isn’t going to stay up like that. There’s someone right downstage in front of an audience member; how are we possibly going to be seeing the show like that? So it’s inevitable that that thing is going to move, but it’s still surprising and rewarding when it lowers down into the ground. It’s the same thing with the wall. You walk in and see a curtain and think that the curtain is not going to be there. It has some kinetic or potential energy. You think it’s going to move, and it does. It’s completely inevitable, and yet when it moves it’s completely surprising.”
Having done the show off-Broadway at the Public Theater, the production team salvaged much of the original light wall and brought in motors that ran three out of the four pods. However, “the whole rig and the mechanism had to be rebuilt,” Korins says. Once everything else got put into place at the Belasco, they were off and rockin’ once again.”
Korins says that he learned a lot about collaboration on Passing Strange, particularly as someone who likes to “stay off the stage” as a designer and who tries to serve the piece and illuminate the text. “Part of it was about this light wall and breaking new ground in the way that lighting and set designers collaborate,” he says, “and also what it was like to collaborate with people who had never made theatre ever. Stew, Heidi, and the band have never made theatre. How do you make it feel right as a theatrical piece, but how do you also break new ground? I think that was the thing that I learned and that was also the biggest challenge. How do you play well with others who don’t even know the rules of the game?”
Does he think that the experience was fulfilling for the band? “I know it was,” replies Korins. “I know that they had a great time with it.” So did the audience.
