Word: stew
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...studded doors or wandering along sandy pathways that lead to pristine mosques. Tour guides can also take you into some of the houses, whose interiors are painted with intricate red patterns and hung with colorful mirrored cloth. Here visitors are often invited to enjoy a hearty meal of camel stew...
...hoping to reel in the sort of people who have traditionally turned their noses up, and their iPods off, at show-tunes-style musicals. One of them, Passing Strange, is an idiosyncratic mix of rock concert and theatrical bildungsroman, presided over by a Los Angeles-based alt-rocker named Stew. The other, In the Heights, is a Latin- and hip-hop-flavored love letter to the Hispanic neighborhood of Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. The two shows have little in common except that neither could by any stretch of the imagination be mistaken for Phantom of the Opera...
...their heart of hearts," says Stew (real name: Mark Stewart), the creator and composer of Passing Strange, "I think every rock-'n'-roll guy who always laughs at the American musical in truth wants to write a musical. You don't want to be with a touring band every night. And it gives you a chance to tell a story." A native of Los Angeles who has been recording albums and doing cabaret shows with his band, the Negro Problem, for the past 10 years, Stew, 46, had seen only one musical--How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying...
Dramatically, the show feels a little padded (shorter stays and another stop on this tour might have helped), but musically, it's original and extraordinarily winning. Stew, a bald, bespectacled guitarist who leads the band and narrates, is a professorial presence onstage whose flat, prosy singing voice gives an ironic grounding to the lyrical, gently rocking melodies. He's a model of a new kind of stage composer, one neither steeped in Broadway tradition nor reacting overtly against it. "Without casting any aspersions," says Stew, "I don't think most of the so-called rock onstage sounds like anything...
...Manuel Miranda, 28, the conceiver, composer, lyricist and star of In the Heights, had a bit more experience with musicals than Stew did--he got what he describes as a "lethal dose of musical theater" while acting in shows at his New York City grade school (the short Puerto Rican sixth-grader played Conrad Birdie in Bye Bye Birdie). He started writing In the Heights when he was living in the Latino house at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., incorporating the hip-hop that he had grown up listening to as well as the Latin styles of favorite artists like...