"Stew" is a great moniker for the rock musician-poet-filmmaker, all-around-performing-artist, whose Passing Strange made its bow last week at Berkeley Rep. He's a rich mix of flavors, a bubbling cauldron of ideas and talents, and his latest effort, which takes an autobiographical look at his development as a young black musician, is a kind of spicy recipe based on his life. Some of the ingredients might seem improbable, but the final dish is worth savoring. Passing Strange takes its title from Othello's description of how he won Desdemona's heart. But as with much of the wordsmithy in this play -- which Stew and partner Heidi Rodewald first developed at the Sundance Institute and which will move on to New York's Public Theater after the Berkeley run -- "passing" is meant to encompass numerous other meanings: passing for white or passing for black, being passed up, passing through, passing on. The word itself has a sense of restlessness that is reflected in the rhythm of the play as well as the music, as it follows Stew's youthful escapades -- a Baptist upbringing in LA and coming of age amidst rarefied surroundings in Amsterdam and Berlin.
