You can’t take your eyes off him. The script for this autobiography of an artist isn’t always nuanced but Giles Terera as its narrator is sublime, filling every line with the weight of time passed, every move with the knowledge of mistakes made. And he has a cracking turn on the electric guitar.
Performed on Broadway in 2008, Stew’s coming-of-age rock musical leapfrogs through styles and genres as Terera’s character watches a younger version of himself (Keenan Munn-Francis) flee the limits of his cosy middle-class life in 70s LA to a highly American ideal of Europe. First it’s Amsterdam, then Berlin, as he tries on different selves in an attempt to find himself through sex, drugs and radical performance art. The rowdiness and high-energy performances amp up every moment under Liesl Tommy’s bright, imaginative direction.
Terera holds the stage with his buzzing energy, cueing and quietening the band with a tiny flick of his wrist, as if he’s choosing which snippets of his life he wants to listen to again. With musical direction from Jerome van den Berghe, the band are beautifully balanced, fluidly part of the cast who move from doped-up free-love hippies to screaming anarchists. Caleb Roberts stands out as both, first as the flamboyant church choir leader and later the avant garde cabaret artist. Every choice he makes is designed for delight.
The outrageous is where this show soars. Stew’s lyrics are at their most interesting when they are ambitiously strange and witty, allowing the cast to go all out. Our protagonist’s urge to find where he fits is sharply written too, as he learns what being Black in these different cities makes him to others, and what it means to him. There are moments of over-sincerity that lack the character legwork required, revealing an overall lack of jeopardy to drive the plot, but it’s a wild ride to join along the way.
Through it all, Terera wears his hindsight with a weighty elegance: a tiny gesture warns his teenage self not to say the idiotic thing he’s about to. When Munn-Francis leaves a lover in Amsterdam, Terera catches her wrist as she rushes past. He holds the years in his gaze, the longing, the loss, the what-could-have-been. He doesn’t just play the part, he lives it.
At the Young Vic theatre, London, until 6 July
