Portrait of a Screwup

Stew, the narrator and co-creator of the largely autobiographical and almost illicitly entertaining musical "Passing Strange," is not much of an actor, and he doesn't really claim to be. He's more of an indie-soul Puck, planting himself in the middle of the stage and observing his younger self's obsessive stumblings toward "the Real" with deadpan bemusement.

Best known as the stocky, goateed leader of the rock band the Negro Problem, Stew (born Mark Stewart) has expanded his scope with this knowing portrait of the artist as a young screwup. It's a witty, boisterous, often heretical dissection of racial identity in all its modern-day fluidity. It's also a hell of a good time.

"Passing Strange" began life as a semi-staged club act; its transition into a fully realized theatrical piece began a year ago at the Public Theater, and many of the lumps from that fledgling version remain. But its bigger, brasher arena-rock set pieces, co-written with the onstage bassist Heidi Rodewald, work better in the more conventional setting of a Broadway theater. Surprisingly, though, so do their semi-affectionate parodies of teeth-gnashing German performance art, the sort of material you wouldn't expect to see within Molotov cocktail-throwing distance of Broadway.

Director Annie Dorsen has recalibrated the performances of her excellent original cast for the larger space, and while the marvelous Dan-Flavin-on-Ecstasy wall of neon by Kevin Adams and David Korins has lost some of its initial impact, virtually everything else in this wicked and often wonderful piece has improved.

Stew takes firm control of the action from the beginning, shifting confidently from a casual narration to a world-weary baritone to a full-throttle blues holler. He knows how to reel in an audience: His "tossed-off" asides sound awfully similar to the ones he used last spring, yet they still somehow feel spontaneous. His and Ms. Rodewald's crafty score hops from piano pop to (intentionally) inept punk to fret-shredding rock to R&B, and Stew's lyrics more than keep pace. Take this transformative church service in Los Angeles:

And Mr. Franklin plays piano like he was mad at it,
Till it started to hum.
And the church was getting bad at it
Like a stained glass drum.

This is the first of many mini-epiphanies for Stew's alter ego, simply named Youth (Daniel Breaker). Youth soon abandons his mother (the commanding Eisa Davis) and their cozy middle-class existence for Europe in search of the Real, spurred on by a choir director who never had the nerve to make the trip himself. First comes the lotus-eating hedonism of Amsterdam, where hashish-fueled threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes prevent him from doing any songwriting. (It is at this point that Karole Armitage's sweaty choreography kicks into gear.)

And so the gladder but not much wiser Youth heads to Cold War-era Berlin — Stew's real-life home for many years — in search of a more deeply felt Real. "It was two miles from right, / It was always all night," Stew sings, but his early nihilistic impressions soon give way to a curiously touching affection for his new "family" of radicals.

In order to join their ambient sturm und drang, however, he needs to completely overhaul his racial identity. This is where the show's multi-layered title comes in: Unlike so many African-Americans who have sought advancement by "passing" for white, Youth goes in the opposite direction, trading in his comfortable background for that of Mr. Middle Passage, a streetwise kid forced to "hustle for dimes on the mean streets of South Central." This intra-racial form of radical chic proves successful, although the praise is tinged with colonialist condescension: "We love you," declares one fellow artist, "like an anthropologist loves a tribe."

Mr. Breaker has that exceedingly rare ability to make post-adolescent self-involvement and sanctimoniousness endearing, and he and Stew have developed an easy rapport that wasn't evident last year. When Youth grabs Stew's microphone during a climactic realization, taking brief ownership of his future, the effect is both offhanded and riveting.

Other moments don't fare nearly as well. The playwriting dictum "Show, don't tell" was clearly invented in the days before acid trips, judging from the unusually tiresome example shown here, and a Western-style R&B ballad for Youth's girlfriend in Berlin (an irresistible Rebecca Naomi Jones) is as tuneful as it is inappropriate. Worst of all, Stew and Ms. Dorsen fail to flesh out the final plot twists from a dramatic perspective, settling instead for a Stew mini-concert with Mr. Breaker in a decidedly secondary role, and the rest of the company stranded on the sidelines.

All of these problems were there at the Public, and it is discouraging that they remain. But the enormous goodwill engendered by Stew, his uniformly skilled band of brothers and sisters, and a thunderously eclectic rock score more than compensate. The search for the Real is hardly confined to those who make art. For those content to see it made in front of them, loudly and lovingly, "Passing Strange" is a great place to look — a place where, in the words of our roly-poly ringleader, "whether you get it or not — it's got."

Open run (111 W. 44th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-239-6200).