|
PASSING STRANGE--THE MOVIE Send This Review to a Friend
How you react to director Spike Lee’s film version of the stage production “Passing Strange” may depend largely on your reaction to the original if you saw it. If you are coming fresh to the movie, you will have the advantage of experiencing it without preconceived impressions. Having seen both the off-Broadway and Broadway productions, I am not one who was especially enthusiastic about the show, both because of the banality of the book and the thunderous rock score, although I very much appreciated the level of the performances and the flashes of satire that permeate the “Candide”-like tale of a young African-American man going abroad to find himself. The film is even more in-your-face than the exuberant stage production, which makes the performances seem even more dynamic. In fact, since Lee in part filmed an actual stage production, you can see sweat glistening on faces as a result of the energy level required for a total performance.
Lee also filmed the show in special sequences minus an audience, thus getting the sort of angles and close-ups that could be blended into the whole and thereby obtain a hybrid that avoided the impression of a mere filmed stage production. The result highlights the essence of this work by Stew, who provided the book and lyrics and collaborated on the music with Heidi Rodewald. Stew also remains the narrator as well as the lead musician.
The casting is the same, with Daniel Breaker dominating as the youth who pretends he comes from a ghetto life instead of his middle class background in 1970s Los Angeles as he explores life in Amsterdam and Berlin. Eisa Davis’s performance as his mother who longs for him to return home to her is even more striking on film.
Others in the cast that brings us closer via film include de’Adre Aziza, Colman Domingo, Chad Goodridge and Rebecca Naomi Jones playing the assortment of characters in the young man’s odyssey. The cast members give life to the satirical view of left-wing politics and sexual freedom that the protagonist encounters in his voyage of discovery. Credit Matthew Libatique, director of photography, with accomplishing the logistical technique needed for the adaptation to the screen.
|