Passing L.A. By
Our critic turns heckler
By Don Shirley
Sometimes it’s necessary to heckle L.A. producers about the good shows that got away.
Take Passing Strange. This indie musical, a wonderfully imaginative hybrid of theater and rock concert, should have played L.A. first. Its narrator and co-creator Stew is known for running an L.A.-based band, the Negro Problem. The first third of Passing Strange is about Stew’s youth in South Central. True, most of the rest of the show is about how he rebelled by fleeing to the more bohemian Amsterdam and Berlin. But the script ends with his unexpectedly poignant return to L.A.
Although Passing Strange was conceived in New York, when Stew and company were performing at a pub near the New York Public Theater, its premiere was at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2006, after development workshops at the Sundance Institute in Utah and at Stanford. It didn’t open on the East Coast until an off-Broadway run in 2007.
I saw it on Broadway a few days before it closed there last Sunday. Apparently Stew’s Tony Award, for his droll and often lyrical script, wasn’t enough to keep the show going at the box office – although on the Tuesday I saw it, the house was packed with deliriously happy theatergoers.
It would be swell to report that a savvy L.A. producer spotted the potential for the show early in its development and made a deal to bring it here, straight from New York. But I haven’t heard of any such plan. And with Spike Lee filming the Broadway production last weekend, the show’s onstage future might be limited. It’s difficult to imagine anyone other than Stew narrating his own story.
If it’s strange that the L.A. theatrical world passed right by Stew without ever noticing him, it’s even stranger that Parade passed by L.A. for a decade. Finally, this 1998 musical is in its first professional Los Angeles County production – but in Palos Verdes, far from the heart of L.A. theater.
Not that I’m complaining about the Neighborhood Playhouse, where Parade has briefly sprung into life. Located on top of a cliff looking north over the southern Santa Monica Bay, it offers L.A.’s most scenic intermission view. The theater itself has a makeshift appearance, with some problematic sightlines, but Brady Schwind’s cast is convincingly professional, and Jason Robert Brown’s sophisticated score is performed by 29 voices and 12 instrumentalists.
In 1999, Parade won Tonys for both Alfred Uhry’s book and Brown’s score. But it lost the best musical prize to Fosse, which hardly had a book – and used other shows’ music. Still, this travesty of justice might not have counted against the show’s commercial prospects as much as the fact that the story ends in an on-stage lynching. It’s based on the true tale of Leo Frank (Craig D’Amico), the Georgia Jew who was wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of one of his employees and subsequently swung from a vigilante gang’s gallows in 1915. This depressing denouement, however, is balanced by a warmly human tale of the evolution of Frank’s marriage.
Most of L.A.’s major theaters are nonprofits, which are supposed to be able to tackle challenging material more often than are the commercial theaters. L.A.’s flagship company, Center Theatre Group, is currently presenting Of Equal Measure, which is set in the same era and deals with some of the same topics as Parade, much less successfully (see the Stage listings). Brown’s sunnier musical 13 opened in a CTG production last year and now is headed for Broadway. There’s really no justification for the decade-long absence from L.A. of Brown’s crowning achievement.
Parade will play Palos Verdes for only one more weekend, and it’s likely to sell out. But some other producer or company should take this opportunity to bring to the center of L.A. a Parade that has nothing to do with floats and flowers.
Parade, Neighborhood Playhouse, Palos Verdes Estates. (800) 595-4849, neighborhoodplayhouse.net.
Published: 07/23/2008
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