When You're Strange

"'I’ve hated it since I was 9 years old,' Stew says of his hometown. 'I’ve hated it since I used to watch the Rice-A-Roni commercials and see people riding on cable cars and think, Why don’t we have those? I would see people in New York on television riding subways and say, Why don’t we have those?'
'Stew doesn’t drive, by the way,' adds Rodewald, a sylph-slender redhead who was born in Pomona and grew up in Orange County.
'When I was growing up,' Stew says, 'in high school, we were into punk—we were into London and New York, and we wanted our city to feel like a city. Like when you walk around, you’d see people on the street. We used to go to downtown L.A. on weekends in our new-wave suits, because it wasn’t enough to dress new wave—we wanted to be in a city. We wanted to be someplace urban.'"

In the LA Weekly, Judith Lewis interviews Stew of The Negro Problem about his hit Broadway musical, Passing Strange.