'Passing Strange'
An Apple Core Holdings presentation of a Forty Acres and a Mule production. Produced by Spike Lee, Steve Klein. Executive producers, Ken Greif, Larry Horn, Klein, Will Kohane. Directed by Spike Lee. Book and lyrics, Stew; music, Stew, Heidi Rodewald.
With: Stew, Daniel Breaker, de'Adre Aziza, Eisa Davis, Colman Domingo, Chad Goodridge, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Heidi Rodewald, Christian Cassan, Christian Gibbs, Jon Spurney.
"Passing Strange" is Spike Lee's record of the Broadway musical that ran six months last year. This first-rate multicamera transcript of a terrific show should delight musical fans (and many who think they aren't) as a niche broadcast item. An all-black-cast tuner sans stars that didn't fit into any conventional "black" (or even Broadway) musical idiom, "Passing" was too idiosyncratic for commercial success despite all critical raves.
Stew, squat book/lyric writer and composer (with Heidi Rodewald, his principal collaborator in cult band the Negro Problem), serves as onstage narrator for a freewheeling, seemingly autobiographical story. Youth (Daniel Breaker) escapes his middle-class Los Angeles roots and overattentive mother (Eisa Davis) in a quest for "the real" that takes him from hippie-ish Amsterdam to Berlin's radical art-politik fringes. Lee adds two short 8mm sequences and a backstage interlude in an otherwise straightforward HD presentation as energetic as Annie Dorsen's staging itself. While excess closeups are offputting at first -- we don't need to see every sweaty pore in a show designed for the big theatrical picture -- the witty writing, winning perfs and often irresistibly catchy songs soon work their magic.
Camera (color, HD), Matthew Libatique; editor, Barry Brown. Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (Spectrum), Jan. 19, 2009. Running time: 136 MIN.
Contact the Variety newsroom at
news@variety.com