Passing Strange, Young Vic review: A soul-stirring musical pilgrimage
Passing Strange review and star rating: ★★★★★
Passing Strange has been cherished in the States ever since its conception in 2006, bagging a Tony Award and numerous high-profile runs. It’s no wonder: this rock musical about a young man who leaves his religious upbringing to devour the 1970s punk scenes of Berlin and Amsterdam stirs the soul.
It does so in a way I haven’t quite seen before: the story of the unnamed ‘Youth’ is delivered by a live rock band’s fourth-wall-breaking singer-narrator, played with a velvety confidence and almost frustrating suaveness by Giles Terera, famous for performing the banger ‘The Room Where It Happened’ when he originated the role of Aaron Burr in the London production of Hamilton. (The narrator is an older version of the ‘Youth.’)
It’s part trashy punk rock gig where on one occasion, unable to to ingest the guitar refrains from their seats, a third of the audience stands up to head bash, partly a series of delicate little pieces of performance art telling the story of the Youth as he arrives in Amsterdam and falls in love, then moves to a communal living space in Berlin where he has to prove his left-wing political ideals to be ‘accepted’ by his edgy housemates.
There are some astonishing pieces of choreography, including one where Youth goes stage diving, of protest art and drug taking, the scenes combining synchronised movements and vocal arrangements to frequently manage to sum up the vibe of Europe’s frenetic cities of hedonism and self-discovery. It’s a confident debut by newcomer Keenan Munn-Francis, whose breakthrough role in new British film Black Dog earlier this year was given four stars by this newspaper. He wears the youthful ennui, lust and frustration like a glove.
It’s all so deliciously watchable and refreshingly unworthy. At one point Terera interrupts a line in the script, joking that “none of us know about hustling for dimes”, a reference to the middle class Young Vic theatre’s audience that felt genuinely funny rather than self-referential in an uncomfortably smarmy way like so many of those theatre audience references can.
Youth is also never allowed to relish in pretentiousness or self-indulgence; the party is always satirised as well as celebrated by the artist Stew’s balanced book and lyrics. “Healing and the smashing of capitalism go hand-in-hand,” one of his comrades says, which gets a decent laugh. But it is equally pithy and properly emotional: “Today in Amsterdam you taught me how to wear my body. You taught me how to wear it like a gown,” someone pithily says. “You’re looking for something in life that can only be found in art,” says someone else.
This is without mentioning the music, by Heidi Rodewald and Stew, that oscillates between symbol-crashing to arresting minor harmonies and melodies that became earworms by the time I was queuing for a drink in the interval.
It also just feels so refreshingly un-American (in fact, it feels British) in the way it satirises, never replacing meaning with needless sentimentality, always scrutinising the party line. There’s nothing quite like this on the London stage right now: as riotous as it is a proper examination of each of our lifelong journeys to go within and do whatever we need to do to find out who we truly are.
Passing Strange plays at the Young Vic until 6 July
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