Old Broadway met New Broadway under one roof that was at various intervals in the evening being raised by this hard-driving rain of rock, pop, funk, punk, gospel and blues.

Somebody with an otherwise one-note moniker of Stew composed the above with the assistance of Heidi Rodewald and did his own lyrics — or, more accurately, chants.

Midway through the first act, three little words — "I'm All Right," repeated over and over again ("about eight thousand times" is the lyricist's modest estimate) — work hypnotic wonders on the audience. If you can break out of the spell and look around you, you'll see hundreds of heads bopping to and fro like an overcharged dodo bird dunking for water.

"I thought it was a religious experience tonight — that's how deep it was," confessed one contented customer — Jerry Stiller — at the after-party, the first Broadway event held at the elegant new Espace on West (Very West) 42nd Street. "I was viscerally moved. I lost track of words and didn't deal with anything but the emotion that swept through my body."

As if harder evidence was required, Marian Seldes stepped to the center of the vast first-room and, flanked on all fronts by exuberant first-nighters, revived a long-lost theatrical tradition —the Reading of the Review (in this case, Charles Isherwood's rhapsodic notice in The New York Times). All raves should be so eloquently enunciated.

"I haven't seen anything like that in 20 years!" exclaimed Aubrey Bernard, senior writer for The New York Beacon. The reader of the review goes back much farther than that, however. "The last time I heard a review read at an opening night party," said La Seldes, "was when I was in Ondine with Audrey Hepburn. We were at Sardi's." The reader, she relayed, was the play's director, Alfred Lunt.

Stew took such extravagant responses in stride, as if they went with the territory. No, he didn't particularly notice what a passionate crowd he was playing to on opening night "because we just do our show," he said with real matter-of-factness. "It's the normal thing for rock 'n' roll. We try to engage people, make them understand that what's happening is happening in the moment. We're living human beings up there performing. We're not automatons. We're not robots. We're real — so you can yell back at us. You can say 'It's All Right' back. It's call-and-response, y'know. It's a rock 'n' roll thing."

His director, Broadway-debuting too like Stew — Annie Dorsen — seconded that: "That's the whole hybrid of the rock 'n' roll concert and theatre. The thing that you do when the crowd is hot at a rock show is just keep going — when it's good, you just keep going — and so we tried to incorporate a lot of that. There's some flexibility — when it's a really lively audience — to take it to another place. The actors, the band — all 11 people up there — are so attuned to each other now that they make a lot of little decisions. It's a rock show out of which a play emerges. I don't know if that's good marketing copy, but it's accurate."

Passing Strange came from rock roots, from pub to Public — from Joe's Pub to, next door, The Public Theater, which 40 years ago was The House of Hair, a milestone in pop-rock musicals. "We always thought there was something a little magical about the fact that The Public was the commissioning theatre that started this crazy project," admitted director Dorsen. "The idea at first was that Stew and Heidi should work on something for the theatre, but I think that might have been a cabaret show. Then, they met me, and we fell into working together and got more and more ambitious. A lot of things really came through the process together. We discovered what the play was about as we developed it."

The producers at the party sported headgear a long way from the snappy Fedoras favored by the producers in The Producers — warm, wintry, knitted stocking caps with the show's logo splashed across. "Stew always wears a hat like that in the winter so the kids in the office had these made up for me," lead producer Liz McCann offered by way of an explanation, but she was hard-pressed to explain the immediate hosannas for Passing Strange. "I can't quite take it all in," admitted the lady who got Edward Albee's Goat and took it not only to Broadway but to the Tony podium as the Best Play of 2002.

Albee was one of two Pulitzer Prize-winners at the opening — the other: Toni Morrison — but he skipped the party, being two weeks away from 80 and three weeks away from opening a double-bill revival of his The American Dream and The Sandbox that he is directing at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Brian Murray, fresh from Albee's latest (Me, Myself and I) which world-premiered at the McCarter last month and may well make it to Broadway by McCann next fall, also turned out in support of his frequent producer.

Looking like some towering Viking god in his new producer-chapeau, The Public's Oskar Eustis crowed that Passing Strange was "the first time I've taken something from inception and gotten it all the way to Broadway," but he added the cautionary footnotes that (1) he wasn't kingpin at The Public at the time and (2) that it really wasn't his idea.

	Spike Lee, Martha Plimpton, Jerry Stiller, Deborah Harry, James Lipton, Rosie Perez, John Ortiz and Halley Feiffer.
	photo by Aubrey Reuben

"The very first idea for this show came from Bill Bragin, who ran Joe's Pub, where Stew and Heidi used to play. Bill said to Stew, 'Have you ever thought about doing a piece of theatre?' Stew said, 'Yeah, actually, I'd love to,' and then the process started. I joined on three months later up at Sundance where I was mentoring, and we took it from there." Continued...