Performance Date & Time
Friday, October 24th at 7:30 pm

Masks will be required during this performances.

STEW: STEWDIO zero

This performance is a part of our resident artist series

Written and Performed by Stew

featuring Heidi Rodewald

…and more!

Join us for the launch of STEWDIO ZERO, the residency of Tony Award-winner Stew at JACK. This first installment kicks off a series of new and revived works that Stew will share throughout his time with us. On Friday, October 24, 2025, dive into a rare retrospective with songs from Stew’s shows that have never been performed in New York or have not been heard here in years, alongside brand new works-in-progress and spoken word.

The room will be electric.

Seats are limited.

Bring a friend and be part of the night as it comes to life.

About the Artist

Stew Stewart is a Tony Award and two-time Obie Award winning playwright/performer, a critically acclaimed singer/songwriter, and veteran of multiple dive-bar stages. He is Professor of the Practice of Musical Theater Writing at Harvard University, where his classes are hothouses of multi-disciplinary, self-challenging experimentation, where he strives to demystify the creative process for his students.

Stew’s work has been featured on multiple occasions at joints like Harlem Stage, Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Getty Museum, Hammer Museum, UCLA Live, Seattle Repertory Theater, NPR, and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, among others. 

In 2024 Stew debuted High Substitute for the Head Lecturer (2024) at Harlem Stage, a meditation/mediation on Amiri Baraka. In 2015, Stew, along with artistic partner-in-crime, Heidi Rodewald, created and performed Notes of a Native Song, a concert-collage of songs, text, and video inspired by James Baldwin and commissioned and produced by Harlem Stage.

Stew’s works include High Substitute for the Head Lecturer (2024) Maybe There’s Black People in Fort Green and A Clown with the Nuclear Code, written for Spike Lee’s TV show She’s Gotta Have It (2018 & 19); Resisting My Resistance to the Resistance, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017); Mosquito Net (NYUAD Arts Center, Abu Dhabi (2016); Notes of a Native Song (2015); Wagner, Max!!! Wagner!!! commissioned by and debuted at Kennedy Center, DC (2015); Chicago Omnibus commissioned by & debuted @ Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; California Analog (2013) Commissioned by the University of California, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Omnibus (2010) Commissioned by & debuted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Making It (2010) commissioned by and debuted at St Ann’s Warehouse.

Spike Lee’s Passing Strange (2009)

Tony for Best Book of a Musical. Broadway. 2008

Obie: Best New Theater Piece & Best Ensemble. Public Theater (2007)

PASSING STRANGE: World Premiere. Berkeley Repertory. (2006)

Stew & The Negro Problem have released 14 critically acclaimed albums between 1997 and the present. Stew is the composer of Gary Come Home of Sponge Bob SquarePants fame, which, honestly, is all anyone cares about anyway.

Heidi Rodewald is the Tony Award-nominated, 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 ten critically acclaimed albums. Theatre includes: Passing Strange (The Public Theater, Belasco); Brooklyn Omnibus (BAM Next Wave Festival); Making It (St. Ann’s Warehouse); Family Album (Oregon Shakespeare Festival); Notes of a Native Song (Harlem Stage); Wagner, Max! Wagner!! (Kennedy Center); The Total Bent (The Public Theater). Composer with librettist Donna Di Novelli: The Good Swimmer (BAM Next Wave Festival); A Lifesaving Manual (UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance). TV includes: SpongeBob SquarePants (Nichelodeon); She’s Gotta Have It (Netflix). Film includes: Passing Strange (40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks and Apple Core Holdings Production); Criminal (The New Yorker); Over The River & Through The Woods (Contemptible Ent); Reprieve (The Interval); I Dream Too Much (77 Films, Attic Light Films, Pantheon of Women).