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Linda Winer: Broadway's 'Passing Strange' season

Linda Winer | Critical Mass

July 13, 2008

Daniel Breaker plays his younger self; Eisa Davis, his mother in "Passing Strange" . Singer-songwriter Stew is narrator, book writer, lyricist, co-composer and lead guitarist of the musical, "Passing Strange" about a young middle-class African-American man's journey in search of his personal and artistic identity. (Newsday Photo / Ari Mintz)

Ever since "Passing Strange" was virtually overlooked by the Tony Awards last month, I've been nagging friends to see the show - the sooner the better.

I have no crystal-ball insights about the musical's life span on Broadway. I hope it runs until Stew, its big, bald and brilliant author-composer-narrator, gets bored retelling his semi-autobiographical journey about middle-class black identity in a hip-hop world.

But this blazingly original show, which lost everything but the best book Tony to the enjoyable but far more conventional "In the Heights," has never managed to break through to the mainstream, multicultural and pop crossover audience it deserves. The box office struggled through the winter and, despite having won a barrel of other major awards this spring, the show only filled an alarming 40 percent of its capacity on the July Fourth weekend.

You can blame its indie-rock volume. Or you can blame the difficulty of marketing a form-bending hybrid musical that's part concert and part coming-of-age black-identity adventure story about South Central L.A. and bohemian subcultures in Amsterdam and Berlin. And while we're looking for blame, the Tony telecast failed to translate Stew's hipster energy into a treat for sophisticated summer tourists.

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What grand news, then, that Spike Lee has signed on to film the show before its take-no-prisoners production dwindles into a memory. [CORRECTION: Spike Lee will film two performances of "Passing Strange" before a live audience Saturday at the Belasco Theatre. Through an editing error, the number of live performances was incorrect in Linda Winer's FanFare column Sunday. Pg. A15 ALL 7/15/08] Some weekend this month, Lee plans to tape three performances - two with audiences at the Belasco Theatre and one without. If anyone can capture the raucous and subtle smartness and sweetness of this important oddball of a show, Lee would seem to be the guy.

Lee, who has been a fan of "Passing Strange" since he saw it - twice - at the Public

Theater last year, says he wants the film to capture the "honest-to-goodness joy that comes from the stage." He describes the show as a great piece of work that needs to be preserved. "People need to see this show."

The Broadway producers will finance the movie, which is probably headed for cable TV.

SAMUEL BECKETT, SUPERSTAR? Here is an astounding and delicious statistic. The theater artist most produced professionally in New York since December - and the one who has attracted the most famous actors - is not Shakespeare, Mamet or even Andrew Lloyd Webber.

How about Samuel Beckett? I love this story. The pitch-dark theatrical visionary, who died 19 years ago at 83, may have had a Nobel Prize and the awe of most serious theatergoers. But with the possible exception of "Waiting for Godot," which established his knotty reputation in 1952, his unadorned, mysterious and compressed work has hardly been luxuriating in the mainstream.

Suddenly, or so it seems, huge stars are being drawn to his sepulchral vision - and, apparently, no parts are too small, no plays too obscure.

First, at the end of last year, we saw Mikhail Baryshnikov transform himself from a dancer to a theatrical vessel in "Beckett Shorts," a 65-minute quartet by the master of compression at the tiny New York Theatre Workshop. Baryshnikov called the plays "the opportunity of a lifetime," which, considering his lifetime, says a lot.

Weeks later, the daring actress (and Harry Potter's snoopy aunt) Fiona Shaw had a splashy success at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in "Happy Days" - up to her neck in an apocalyptic mountain of dirt as the indomitable Winnie in Beckett's harrowing comic 1961 nightmare.

Then in May at BAM, John Turturro was even more unpredictably wonderful as the blind, crippled tyrant Hamm in "Endgame," that hilariously miserable 1957 masterwork. Next to him, stuck forever in a trash can, was dear old mum - a tiny role played exquisitely by Elaine Stritch, the scary-good Broadway diva. "Compared to this," she said, the demonically verbal work of Edward Albee "was a cinch."

Now Dublin's marvelous Gate Theatre, which brought a historic 19-play Beckett festival here in 1996, returns to the Lincoln Center Festival with three brief one-man dramas not originally written for the stage.

Liam Neeson makes his Beckett debut Wednesday in "Eh, Joe," the 30-minute showpiece seen with Baryshnikov in a different production. On Friday comes "I'll Go On," a 90-minute adaptation of three novels by Beckett specialist Barry McGovern. Then Ralph Fiennes opens July 22 in "First Love," a 55-minute adaptation of the World War II novella. (All three events will

be done as marathons July 26 and 27. Check lincolncenter.org for times.)

Although Robin Williams and Steve Martin were in Mike Nichols' awful production of "Godot" in 1988, this acceptance - even embrace - of Beckett in America is a recent phenomenon. Baryshnikov said the work was "like children's plays for adults." Turturro recently told The Nation magazine, "The older you get, the more you realize how realistic his plays are. They just kind of strip down - or everything is taken away - and what's left is the bare bones.... It's really draining, five pages or 10 pages is like a whole play."

The country appears to have grown into Beckett's mordant sense of humor, the giddy recognition of the abyss. As the mother in "Endgame" says, "nothing is funnier than unhappiness."

APROPOS OF MORTALITY. It has been a particularly brutal time for Broadway in the month since the Tony Awards. "Cry-Baby" is already closed. Producers of "November" decided to end the show today rather than replace the departing Nathan Lane. "A Catered Affair" and "The Country Girl" go dark July 27. [CORRECTION: "The Country Girl" closes July 20. The date is incorrect in the "On Theater" column in Sunday's FanFare, which was printed in advance (A21 ALL 07/13/08)]

Although some productions were officially limited runs - including "Sunday in the Park With George," "Top Girls," "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Macbeth" - I'm sure most would have figured out a way to extend if the demand and the prizes were there.

Last season's "Curtains" is gone. "A Chorus Line" is scheduled to shut down Aug. 17. Although the closing date has been pushed back several times, "Rent" is currently set to vacate Sept. 7. Ah, but "Grease," the dreadful one cast on "reality" TV, lives on. That's funny, in an unhappy way, too.