The roots of rock and roll are squarely in gospel and the blues, yet each time an African-American performer plays a style of music driven by electric guitar there will be some reviewers quick to call the performer “refreshing”. Four decades after Jimi Hendrix, these critics seem to find it almost daring that a black artist would choose to deal in rock rather than R’n’B or rap.

What is refreshing about Stew, the performer who has written Passing Strange, is not that his rock guitar so gently weeps, but that his autobiographical show breathes life into an ailing genre – the portrait of an artist as a young man.

For this concert in the occasional form of a book musical, Stew leads an onstage band with sometimes preacherly exhortation. Bald and almost portly, this troubadour sings of growing up middle-class and African-American in Los Angeles.

Like an earlier generation of artists living in southern California (Stravinsky, Brecht, Mann) Passing Strange’s hero feels himself exiled in a palm-tree-lined paradise. Eventually, at the urging of his flamboyant church-choir leader (a terrific Colman Domingo), Stew heads for Europe in search of his true spiritual home.

As Stew’s younger self visits the hashish-hazy cafes of Amsterdam and the radical political underground of Berlin, his music – co-written by Heidi Rodewald – becomes more eclectic, embracing everything from Europop to punk to Kurt Weill. Under the direction of co-creator Annie Dorsen, the songs are enacted by an excellent cast, kept in kinetic and, at times too-dizzying, motion by the choreographer Karole Armitage.

Like an African-American revelling in rock and roll, a young black man searching for answers in Europe is not, in itself, terribly original. James Baldwin and many others long since wrote that book. But Passing Strange has such a high-energy, infectious feel that one forgives its indulgences. I left the theatre feeling elated, and a little unsatisfied. But that response is fully in keeping with Stew’s message – Nirvana doesn’t exist, so enjoy the moment.
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