Word: stews
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...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...
...spends the mornings with her staff readying for question time, that twice-weekly exercise in which the Prime Minister fields queries, and often insults, from opposition M.P.s. A cook is brought in on question days to prepare what Thatcher calls "good nursery food" (shepherd's pie, or perhaps a stew), and the staff works until 2:30 p.m., when the Prime Minister leaves for Parliament in her bulletproof black Daimler...
...recount or some sort of power-sharing arrangement," said Binaifer Nowrojee, director of the Open Society Initiative for East Africa. "As long as there is international attention, there will be restraint. The day the international community is taken by other crises on the globe, Kenya will be left to stew in its own juices and it will get worse. This is the kind of situation if it's not resolved now it will blow up later, and that's where we parallel into Rwanda...