Berkeley — STEPPING outside the studio where the new rock musical "Passing Strange" is being rehearsed -- and "rock musical" seems inadequate for a play that has dispensed with conventional notions of who gets to make musicals, how and for whom -- you quickly get a sense that this is not show business as usual.
Here's the lithe blond choreographer -- knighted in France for her innovations in modern dance -- sticking her hands in her armpits and flapping her elbows at the Juilliard-trained Shakespearean actor.
"That was great, that was inspired -- your chicken," a smiling Karole Armitage exclaims to Daniel Breaker. Minutes before, during the show's first full practice run-through, he'd improvised a flutter from the Funky Chicken to go with the spins and dips in a James Brown-like dance eruption. Maybe it will be a keeper when the show opens Wednesday at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and moves in January to the Public Theater in New York.
"Passing Strange," a co-production of the theaters, is primarily the creation of Stew (born Mark Stewart), a beefy, middle-age L.A. rock musician known only to a smattering of the cognoscenti who have picked up on his decade-long recording and touring career in pop's deep underground, where he fronts a band called the Negro Problem. The band's name toys wryly with Stew's position as a black man hailing from central Los Angeles who performs catchy story-songs that are strong on characterization, owing more to the Beatles or Randy Newman than to the groove-oriented, funky-beat norm generally expected of black musicians. At 45, Stew is a personable fellow with a flinty streak. Don't even get him started on the music industry, which he holds responsible for, among other sins, creating a fallacious racial divide between black music and white.
"Passing Strange" is a fictionalized take on Stew's own coming of age from the mid-1970s to the early '80s. We meet his alter-ego -- known simply as Youth and played by Breaker -- as a reluctant choirboy in a black Baptist church, see him evolve into a howling punk rocker, then cringe at choices he makes as an expatriate tyro artiste, neglecting his ties with home while diving into a new life as the dark-skinned golden boy of an abrasive, anarchistic performance art collective in West Berlin. Heidi Rodewald, the Pomona-raised rocker who is Stew's longtime bandmate and romantic partner, wrote about half the music. Annie Dorsen, a young director who specializes in the offbeat, is their co-creator and guide to the theater realm.
