Stew
How do you feel about the way Passing Strange is playing on Broadway?
I'm thrilled. We've found our sea legs and we're functioning like a band. I don't know how normal [theater] troupes function, but for us it's about finding our rhythm and getting comfortable, then it becomes a party we throw on stage. In a concert, you can have moments to break out and talk to the audience about whatever is on your mind. I miss that a little bit, but I think we've succeeded in allowing for enough improvisation to give each audience a different show. They can sense that what they are seeing may not happen exactly this way tomorrow night.
Two of your lead producers, Gerry Schoenfeld and Liz McCann, are true Broadway old-timers. What's it like to work with them?
You're more of a musical storyteller than the typical rock singer/songwriter.
You and Daniel Breaker [as the young version of Stew's narrator character] don't seem to worry about making the hero likeable. He refuses to come home to see his mother for Christmas!
It's interesting to see you narrating the story, having come out the other side.
What do you enjoy about working with actors?
Did you have the idea that your songs should become a theater piece?
And now you are officially a theater composer.
How are you getting the word out about your show, which has an unusual title and a more diverse target audience than the typical Broadway musical?
Well, Diana Ross' daughter is certainly getting the word out. What was it like the night Diana herself came to a preview?
Tell me about your collaboration with Heidi Rodewald. You two used to be a couple, right?
It's too bad that your mom didn't live to see this show.
No wonder you still live in Berlin.
See Stew in Passing Strange at the Belasco Theatre.
I do, actually, and I'm pretty surprised. I was worried about a proscenium versus a thrust stage, and I was worried about size. Our band has performed in front of thousands of people, but I was concerned about “intimacy,” a word that kept coming up when describing the downtown version of the play. But this theater still feels intimate to me. The history here is incredible. There's a little plaque in the hallway as you walk to my dressing room with the names of some of the people who have performed at the Belasco. I've had a peek at it as I passed by and saw names that were so huge, I couldn't really deal with it. I literally cannot read that plaque; I'm not ready to read it yet, but someday I will. It's almost too much to contemplate that this rock-and-roll singer is in a dressing room where John Barrymore once was.
It's really amazing. On one hand, we come from utterly different worlds. I know nothing about Broadway except what the average boy learns growing up in L.A.—which isn't much because, let's face it, it's not a theater town. They know next to nothing about rock-and-roll. But we have one very important thing in common: Both parties want to entertain. One of them—I can't remember if it was Gerry or Liz—said in a meeting, “There's no reason why this show shouldn't be riveting every minute.” And I said, “You know what? That's exactly how I feel when I go onstage at a club.” If I'm performing in front of 50 or 200 or 2,000 people, that's my credo. Another thing we agree on is that we're serious about the lyrics. They come from a time when lyrics meant something on Broadway. The loud drums and raging guitars [in Passing Strange] might scare them a little bit, but they appreciate the lyrics and they want to hear them. Liz McCann will quote Yeats in a second, and Gerry will talk about Cole Porter like he just ran into him yesterday, so it's really humbling that we agree on so much. I'm not sure that a younger batch of Broadway producers would actually get what I'm doing as well as these two do. It might not be as “passing strange” as people think it is.
Absolutely, and that's another thing they picked up on. People tend to want to talk about the weird places we take you to in Passing Strange—the Berlin performance art and the squatter houses in Amsterdam—but at the end of the day, it's an incredibly simple story. It's really about a boy and his mom. Whatever we do between the beginning and the end of the play, when you finish, you're thinking about your family and the people who raised you. You're thinking about what you did with your life and how that relates to the people who loved you. That's as simple as it gets.
He embodies youthful arrogance, youthful bravado, all that. If you saw a film of yourself when you were young, particularly of a boy in the late teens or early 20s—oh my god, for me, that would be a horror movie! [Laughs.] That whole rock-and-roll swagger, like “I'm here with my guitar, writing great songs, and you can't tell me anything.” Having said that, there are things that happen to [the character] that did not happen to me. It's semi-autobiographical, but I always came home for Christmas when I was living in New York!
A lot of people have commented on that. It's a scene that has occurred in literature—the older self meeting the younger self—and yeah, it's really potent for me; it's a rich thing to experience. I used to just stand there, but now I've gotten more comfortable with embodying this character. When I shoot [Daniel Breaker] a particular look, I can actually feel the audience watching; sometimes I don't even have to say anything. These are things that all actors know, but I'm learning them in front of 900 people every night.
They exercise mental muscles that musicians don't. Actors are all about precision, and rock musicians tend to be about looseness. I admire their timing—knowing when to say something and when not—and the way they are like living instruments. We give them these words, and they turn the dialogue into music. My band has learned a lot from them about precision and discipline and they, in turn, have learned a lot about looseness and improvisation from us. And this not one of these shows where everyone goes home afterwards; we all hang out together. People who see the show say, “We can tell that you guys like each other.”
I would love to do film. I'm not so sure I'm up for stage acting unless it was something really simple [laughs]. I get nervous if a guitar is too far away from me, but I would definitely love to do film. Heidi and I have written a screenplay that we're going to try to shoot when we're not doing this anymore. I'll try anything!
Every singer-songwriter fantasizes about that. If they tell you they don't, they're lying. I don't care if it's rock-and-roll or heavy metal, we all would love to be on a big stage with fancy backlights, and we all love the idea of having the audience come to us instead of us having to go on tour. We like being in the same place every night. But this happened only because of our rapport with Joe's Pub, which is connected with the Public Theater. Bill Bragin, who is now with Lincoln Center, used to book Joe's Pub, and the next thing Heidi and I knew, we were next door talking about developing something. We didn't know what it would be. But the Public Theater recognized, as did the Sundance Institute, as did Berkeley Repertory Theatre, that the songs had enough story going on [to be staged].
I have to tell you: One thing you have in theater that you do not have in the music business anymore is a little thing called artist development. There was a time in the music business when a project would be nurtured—they wouldn't just throw you into the studio and have you record a bad record and then send you home when it didn't sell. This play has been nurtured by the theater community at every level, and that's something you cannot get in the music business anymore. The music business is very cutthroat and cynical. I'm not saying that the theater isn't, but every single person [at the Belasco] is dedicated to doing the best job possible. The rapport we have with the stagehands and with the ushers—everybody in there wants the show to do well. The theater community is a giving community, it's a sharing community and it's incredibly supportive.
I'm the last person you should ask. Heidi and have never known much about how advertising and promotion work. But what I keep hearing is that once you get the right people in to see it, they say, “I've gotta call my friends and tell them to come see this,” for all kinds of reasons. Some people say, “I'm going to tell my husband because he would love to hear a guitar solo on a Broadway stage.” Then there are people who say, “I've never seen a tale of black teen angst on stage.” White teen angst is well documented, you know what I mean? Some people are happy to see the story of a black middle-class kid who wakes up one morning and says, “Hey, I want more than this two-story home and this manicured lawn.” The people at the French restaurant across the street from our theater were telling me they felt like it was their story because it talks about what you give up in terms of family when you emigrate. The piece touches on so many things. But all we can do is give the best show possible and hope people will tell others.
Rhonda Ross had seen the show at the Public a number of times, and [having Diana Ross in the audience] was like a visiting dignitary. I'm a jaded guy who has seen it all; I'm 46 years old, and I don't blink at these modern celebrities. They're all beautiful and cute and everything, but I'm sorry—Diana Ross? She's a part of my DNA. That's royalty [laughs]. She came backstage, and I thought, “Okay, maybe she's going to be a little bit of a diva, maybe she's going to sit there and we're going to crowd around her,” but she was running around the dressing room grabbing people and hugging them like somebody's proud aunt. It was like family! It was incredible.
That's correct. I like to say that what 10 years of rock-and-roll couldn't do, one year of theater did [laughs]. Theater is a lot of work! When you wake up in the morning and realize you've got a 12-hour tech rehearsal ahead of you, you've got to ask yourself, “Am I into this or not?” And if you're into it, you've got to really get into it. I can't say that I'm a perfectionist, but I get pretty tenacious and I can be difficult [laughs]. So, 10 years of driving around in vans and playing all kinds of rock-and-roll shows, that kind of pressure didn't affect us at all, but right around the time the Berkeley Rep production [of Passing Strange] started, she and I had to split up. We still are going to work together. We are committed lifelong collaborators. I can't work with anybody else, and she feels the same way.
We have to. I'm not saying it's not difficult at times. It's very difficult, particularly because we're doing a play about a kid who confuses art and love. And quite frankly, although it's more complicated than that, in a lot of ways, I took the job home all the time. People are going to call me sexist for making this generalization, but I've always believed that women can spin more than one plate at a time. Like on the Ed Sullivan show? Every woman I've ever known, from my mother to my ex-wife to Heidi, can do that. I'm good if I can balance one plate, and when I get that one balanced, I'm sticking with it. I'm trying to learn to be better at [juggling], but I took the job home. Worse than took it home: I was the job. I couldn't separate it from myself. Heidi is able to dedicate herself to her work 100 percent, but she doesn't take it home. She'll also call you on your birthday, you know what I mean? I don't even remember my own birthday sometimes. She's an exceptional person. I don't know too many artists like her.
Yeah, she passed away in 1993. I've got the whole German side of my family [coming to opening night]: my ex-wife, my 15-year-old daughter, my daughter's grandmother. My daughter is the official mascot of the play. She came to Berkeley and hung out and bonded with all the actors, then she came to the Public and stayed for a week and a half.
I'm basically there until my kid graduates from high school. I'm hoping she will want to go to an American college, and then I'll relocate back to the States. I call it the long commute. I get a lot of work done in Berlin; it's calm and the phone doesn't ring. It's hard for me to write here, but New York has been great to me from the moment I started taking my music seriously. I'm from L.A. and have received a lot of acclaim from my hometown, but New York has really taken me under its wing and supported me.