Passing Strange

Meet Stew. He's a performer from Los Angeles who's written a memoir show and brought it to Broadway. It's nominated for best musical. The show started out at Berkeley Rep, so maybe you already know something about it.

Plot Summary: Stew narrates the story, and an actor plays the young Stew. Young Stew lives in LA and doesn't fit in with his church. His mother bugs him. He decides that music is the most important thing to him. Then he moves to Amsterdam to be free. Then to Berlin. And then his mother dies and he feels bad. The end.

I went to this show because everybody loves it, and I hear nothing but praise for it. And yah, I laughed. I cried. (The actress playing the mother was amazing, and she was an understudy.) But I also rolled my eyes a lot. The best part was the beginning when young Stew goes with his mother to church and joins up with rebels in the church choir who smoke pot in their cars. This is when the show is the most fun. The show becomes annoying though when Stew starts tackling questions like "what is real?" and "what is art?" His answer is that "only art is real." When I left the theater I felt like taking a bunch of art and throwing it in the trash in protest. The very last line of the whole show includes the phrase "the real is a construct." Blah blah blah the real is construct blah blah. BLACKOUT. What kind of an ending is this?

I'm also wondering if it's possible to write and star in a Broadway musical about yourself that doesn't make you see so self-obsessed.