Led by Stew and Obie award-winning Heidi Rodewald, this Afro Baroque cabaret ensemble is coveted for their literate precision, sly humor, and deep emotional resonance, hovering between the divergent worlds of rock and theater. Stew's performances have been compared in the same breath with Kurt Weill, Burt Bacharach, and Jackie Gleason.

They will be performing numbers from Stew’s Broadway rock musical, Passing Strange, which was co-composed with Rodewald and earned Stew the 2008 Tony Award for “Best Book of a Musical.” They will also play new songs from Stew and Heidi's upcoming musical.

“Stew’s endlessly inventive music draws on rock, gospel, soul and blues. . . . A winning tribute to the diversity of the black musical experience.”
Hollywood Reporter

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Please also join us for a free screening of the Spike Lee movie, Passing Strange, at the Festival Bar on September 9th! Lee's film is based on Stew's award-winning Broadway rock musical, and tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young black man who leaves behind his middle-class, church-ruled upbringing in mid-1970s Los Angeles to travel to Europe in search of his artistic and personal identity, or what he calls “the real.” There he finds he can exploit his “South Central” persona, playing the cool black expatriate/musician who speaks for his people. Picaresque misadventures with sex, drugs, politics, and art find him in far-out Amsterdam and hypermilitant Berlin. In the end he finds complexity and even hypocrisy are not limited to middle-class black-American life, and that while to him art may be more real than life, only love is truly more than real.

Sept 9 at 8pm

Free / 135m

Festival Bar

SW Corner of Spring Garden and Columbus Blvd in Northern Liberties (formerly Club Egypt)