Description
THIS SHOW HAS BEEN POSTPONED. NEW DATE TBD.
Arden welcomes the co-composers of the Broadway rock musical Passing Strange which won a 2008 Tony and was filmed by Spike Lee. Stew and Heidi will appear on our stage with a trio.
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Stew Stewart is a New York City-based singer-songwriter and playwright from Los Angeles, California. Over the years, Stew has dipped his toes into multiple genres including R&B, punk, noise-rock, and jazz. In the early ’90s, he formed the band The Negro Problem—the problem being a rift between the music he wanted to make and the music that was expected from him. Albums with The Negro Problem include Post Minstrel Syndrome (1997), Joys and Concerns (1999), Making It (2002), and more recently Notes of a Native Song (2018), a meditation on James Baldwin. Stew has also had a successful solo career with albums like Guest Host (2000) and The Naked Dutch Painter and Other Songs (2002), which both won Entertainment Weekly’s Album of the Year.
His musical Passing Strange was nominated for several Tonys in 2008 and won for Best Book. Passing Strange also received two Obie awards for Best New Theater Piece and Best Ensemble, and was made into a 2010 movie by Spike Lee. Stew has also been featured in Spike Lee’s Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It. When he’s not experimenting and producing challenging and groundbreaking music and projects, Stew encourages creative thought and artistic transformation in classrooms at Harvard University, the New School, Sarah Lawrence College, Pratt, and many other institutions. In 2018, with students at LaGuardia Community College, he developed a new musical, Columbus is Happening, which he described as an “ode to Queens.”
Heidi Rodewald is the Tony Award-nominated and Obie Award-winning co-composer of the musical Passing Strange, which transferred from The Public Theater to Broadway in 2008 and then was made into a film by director Spike Lee. Rodewald joined the band The Negro Problem in 1997, where she began a longtime collaboration with singer/ songwriter, Stew, and with him released 10 critically acclaimed albums. She is co- composer with Stew of Brooklyn Omnibus, (BAM Next Wave, 2010); Making It (St. Ann’s Warehouse, 2010); Family Album (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2014); Notes of a Native Song (Harlem Stage, 2015); Wagner, Max! Wagner! (Kennedy Center, 2015); and The Total Bent (The Public Theater, 2016). Rodewald scored two short films for director Leigh Silverman, Over The River & Through The Woods (2017) and Reprieve (2018). She is the composer of The Good Swimmer with librettist Donna DiNovelli which had it’s world premiere at BAM’s 2018 Next Wave Festival.