Performance Date & Time
Saturday, June 27th at 7:30 pm

Masks will be required during this performances.

STEWDIO zero #4

A Spoonful of Booker Helps the Fascism Go Down

This performance is a part of our resident artist series

Songs by Stew

Dearest New Yorkers, 
this be our 4th JACK show 
but the first that we've advertised
We waited a bit to get baptized
You could say time was taken to explore 
what we were undoing 
and more
what we were
singing and saying, 
feeling and playing,
revealing and delaying,
but as of todaying...

no conclusions have been come to
no theories succumbed to
only doggerel strummed thru
and sung by the young who
sing it with me
while pointing to what shall be

Here, as always, to bake it real
And to see what we can make each other feel
When we get back
To JACK.

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.