The Tony Award-winning 2008 musical Passing Strange by musician/songwriter Stew chronicles the journey of a young Black man trying to figure out who he is as an artist. It's a journey that Todd Underwood—who directs Salt Lake Acting Company's local premiere of the show—identifies with in a profound way.

"The thing that really brought it home for me is, as a creative, you're always trying to find your voice," Underwood says. "You're always cycling through different voices. It probably took six years for me to find the thing that makes me excited about theater, and makes me want to show up for it in the world."

That long path tracks with the arc of Passing Strange's protagonist, identified simply as "Youth," who leaves his Southern California home as a young man and heads to Europe, hoping to find something he keeps referring to as "the real." Underwood himself undertook a similar journey as a young actor in the mid-1990s, traveling to Germany with a touring show and trying to overcome his anxieties and insecurities.

"I stayed in my hotel [in Bremen] for the first week and a half, because I was terrified," he says. "The only thing I knew about Germany was Nazism, and that they hated Black people. One day got up my gusto, got my German dictionary and ventured out. I went into this shop and tried to talk to someone. This shopkeeper just smiled at me and said, 'I speak English, how can I help you?' We had this wonderful conversation, and it broke down all these biases I had. And it opened up a new world for me: This isn't what I thought it was going to be. This could be an amazing journey."

Passing Strange links that journey to a longer history of Black American artists like James Baldwin and Josephine Baker taking their careers to Europe, because it was a place they could be more accepted. Underwood recalls working with the veteran actor/singer Eartha Kitt, and listening to her describe similar experiences. "She'd tell me all of these stories about not feeling she could be herself," he recalls. "There was Eartha Kitt the persona, then Eartha Mae, who she was. And switching back and forth, because she didn't feel she could put the two together. In Europe, she was celebrated as an artist, and in Europe that's something there's no boundaries on."

Relating to that part of the Youth's story was only one part of what attracted Underwood to Passing Strange. While he never saw the original Broadway production, he says, "I did see the Tony Awards that year, and the performance that they gave. And I though, 'Wow, I'm sorry I missed this.' Even from that two or three minutes, it shocked me, it struck me, it shook me. I picked up the cast recording, and loved what it had to say just on the basis of the music. I thought, 'This must have been an amazing experience.'"

It was only last year, when Salt Lake Acting Company's Cynthia Fleming reached out to Underwood about directing the show, that Underwood caught up with an available visual record of that Broadway run: director Spike Lee's 2009 documentary of the final Passing Strange Broadway performance, which debuted at that year's Sundance Film Festival. "I was blown away by the storytelling," Underwood says, "and just how non-musical-theater it was."

As impressed as Underwood was with what he saw in that original production, he also had his own vision for Passing Strange, one he freely credits to his terrific technical collaborators. "You hopefully assemble a great creative team [when you're directing]: set designer, lighting designer, costume designer. And share your feelings about the show, and let them go away and have their own thoughts about it," Underwood says.

One of those thought involved the costumes, which in the Broadway incarnation were generally limited to black outfits. "I thought, 'We're missing color, we're missing a particular kind of energy,'" Underwood recalls. "The costume designer's first [inspiration documents] were so not what the Broadway show did, which then created this whole world we could play in. ... The 1980s in L.A. were a very specific look, but we're trying to exaggerate it as well; our memory can sometimes stretch and change and tell some lies. So we wanted to play in that world: This is one person's remembrance of it, and how it can be skewed."

Memory becomes a significant thematic component of Passing Strange, but it also explores colliding components of identity. As a Black man in Europe, the Youth plays a kind of role expected by the other artists he encounters, one that doesn't actually correspond to the Youth's experience growing up in a middle-class neighborhood and home. "We sometimes, because of self-preservation, allow people to put things on us, ... so that the other person is comfortable, and not intimidated. But I think what the show really tries to do is, 'the real' is about being authentic to oneself. 'The real' is accepting oneself, for all of the good, bad, ugly."