| Woman Times Three |
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| Written by Kevin Filipski | |
 d'Adre Aziza in PASSING STRANGE; photo by Carol Rosegg ******************** TIMESSQUARE.COM: What kind of audiences are you getting at Passing Strange? DE’ADRE AZIZA: What’s cool is that we have a wide variety; it’s not just a bunch of grannies, or just a bunch of kids, or only white or black. Most of our audience comes in with no idea what they’re about to see. What we’ve been hearing when we talk to people afterwards is that they hate “regular” Broadway musicals but they love our show. It’s great that we can’t really put a label on the type of audience we have right now. I think that’s because there’s something about Passing Strange that affects people differently. TS: What was your initial reaction to the score and the script? DA: I said to myself that I really had to do this, mainly because it was just so different than anything else. Where else would I be able to play Dutch, German, and African-American women in the same piece? I always welcome the challenge to do something enriching like this. I love being part of things that are outside the box, that are really risky. TS: How did you prepare to play the three different characters? DA: I had to do research and study up. A lot of Passing Strange was written to be funny, because the characters are extremes. That’s what theater does: It heightens our experiences. The Amsterdam character is a free-spirited young girl, so I was able to do that with no problem. For the German characters, we studied a lot about the 1980s and watched Super 8 footage about squatters and kids at that time to get a sense of what it was like. We don’t really have all of the angst that they had then, because we are doing it more as a comedy. We also worked with a dialect coach to make sure that we had the accents down; we didn’t think they had to be perfect, but we wanted to give the audience a general sense of these people in this time period. TS: Stew has become an unlikely star thanks to Passing Strange. What's it like for you to work on what’s obviously such personal material for him? DA: It's been simply been great. Since he doesn’t come from any kind of theater background, Stew has no preconceived ideas about anything, so he’s really open to our thought processes about our characters and other things onstage. He has no problem changing anything and trying out new things based on our input, which has been really wonderful. Like Stew, all of the musicians are laid-back and fun to be around. All of us in the cast have the same type of vibe and energy, and our personalities mesh. Daniel Breaker is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life, and Eisa Davis knows absolutely everyone in the theater world. TS: Describe how it feels to make your Broadway debut in this show. DA: Well, I’ve always wanted to be on Broadway, so I thought to myself: “This is cool. I’m finally here.” Actually, I think my mother is much more excited about it than I am. I’m just looking at it as another step in my career, and then I’ll move onto other things. Of course, I think it definitely helped my nerves that we had first done the show at The Public Theater and, before that, at Berkeley. That helped calm me down. TS: In Passing Strange, you sing straightforward rock songs. Earlier this season, in Doris to Darlene at Playwrights Horizons, you sang Phil Spector-type girl-group songs with some operatic material by Wagner mixed in. Do you enjoy performing different types of music? DA: I find it a challenge to sing in different styles, and I think it’s great to show my range in different shows. My natural singing voice falls into a jazz style, if you will, and that jazz voice is low and smoky. It’s too bad that I haven’t had much opportunity to sing like that – yet! ***** [For more information, visit passingstrangeonbroadway.com] |
