stew
STEWDIO ZERO #2
ICYMI -
Demz Won't Save You from Fascism!
(Merry X-Mas!!!)
Readers:
Candaceia Charles, LeRoi Richardson, Brandon Woolf
Direction:
Kamilah Mariam
Music composed by Diego Stewart
in collaboration with Dana Lyn
& Mike McGinnis
Songs by Stew
Musicians:
Dana Lyn - violin, keyboards, loops
Mike McGinnis - winds, loops
Diego Stewart - keyboards, loops
Lighting:
KJ Hardy
Assisting:
Max Sedacca
Candaceia Charles (Reader)
Candaceia is a multi-hyphenate artist from Brooklyn, New York. She’s no stranger to the theater, having previously directed Frenchman at The Tank and Cycles at The Chain. As a performer, her favorite Theater credits include Addy and Uno at Theatre Row and Columbus is Happening at Joe’s Pub. She’s also had the honor of performing behind powerhouse artists such as Jennifer Hudson, and Andra Day at Billboard Women in Music and George Lucas’ Christmas party. Candaceia is deeply grateful to God for every opportunity that has brought her to this moment. Endless thanks to her village: too many to name, but you know who you are. Your love sustains me.
LeRoi Richardson (Reader)
LeRoi is a multidisciplinary storyteller working across music, theater, and film. He is a honorary member of Stew + The Negro Problem. He sometimes goes by Augusto Leon, his Rap persona. A sonic explorer with a deep-rooted love for Hip-Hop, Jazz, and Soul, his work blends the rhythms of Black musical traditions with bold narratives that examine identity, history, and cultural memory. He holds a BFA from Marymount Manhattan College, where he double-majored in Musical Theater and Writing for the Stage. He’s working on multiple projects right now, including workshopping his play Frenchman, his response to LeRoi Jones’ Dutchman and adapting Alice in Wonderland into a crime drama universe.
Brandon Woolf (Reader)
Brandon Woolf is an interdisciplinary theater artist. Over the last fifteen years, he co-founded and co-directed three public performance ensembles – UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP), Shakespeare im Park Berlin, and Culinary Theater. Brandon has recently presented work at Brooklyn's Central Library, Invisible Dog Art Center, Jewish Museum of Maryland, Target Margin Theater, Brooklyn College, Prelude Festival, 14th Street Y, Fulton Center, Harvard’s Mahindra Center, ifk Vienna, Görlitzer Park in Berlin, and a USPS mailbox on Prospect Park West. He is also a clinical associate professor of theater at New York University, where he directs the Program in Dramatic Literature. brandonwoolfperformance.com
Kamilah Mariam (Director)
Kamilah is a multi-hyphenate theatre artist based in NYC. She holds a BFA from Occidental College in Theater and Performance Studies, and Critical Theory & Social Justice. Her work aims to straddle a Black past, present, and future simultaneously in order to reimagine all three. She views each of her mediums, from directing to stage management to sound design, as a means to that end. She is currently working on Room 204 at The Walker Hotel and T. Alexandra Holloman's Eva's Eye. Other recent credits include Minstrel??? at The Tank and Colder by the Water at Theater for the New City.
Diego Stewart (Composer, Musician)
Diego was born in Manhattan in 2010. He likes hanging out with friends, playing soccer, and collecting sneakers, clothes, and art. Diego will pursue a career in fashion design. He also has a crested gecko named Schmecky, and a dog named Samus. Diego loves traveling. He also enjoys making art and designing clothes. Some of Diego’s favorite music artists are Tyler the Creator, XXXTENTACION, and Danny Brown.
Dana Lyn (Musician)
Multi-instrumentalist and composer Dana Lyn has received commissions from Brooklyn Rider, the National Arts Council of Ireland, the Apple Hill String Quartet, A Far Cry, and Palaver Strings. Dana was an artist-in-residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a recipient of the American Composers Forum Create Commission, an awardee of the NYFA Women’s Fund Award for Media, Music and Theater, and a Sundance Composer Lab Fellow. She has made eight albums as a bandleader or co-bandleader and has written music for short films, New York Times’ audio stories, and for dance. Her contributions to the Ken Burns documentary American Holocaust were called “sublime” by The Boston Globe. Dana is also a well-versed fiddle player in the Irish tradition.
Mike McGinnis (Musician)
Clarinetist/Saxophonist/Composer Mike McGinnis has worked with some of today’s most innovative and influential artists including Anthony Braxton’s Trillium E Orchestra, Steve Coleman's Aquarius Ingress (Ravi Coltrane, Tony Malaby, Miguel Zenon and Chris Speed), the Lonnie Plaxico Group, Stew & Heidi (of Passing Strange/the Negro Problem), Fela! On Broadway (saxophone soloist), Art Lande, Yo La Tengo, the Ohad Talmor/Steve Swallow Sextet, Alice Coltrane, sculptor Martin Kersels (Whitney Biennial 2009) and the Losers Lounge among others. He has released several recordings as a leader and/or co-leader with the four bags, OK|OK, DDYGG and Between Green.
KJ Hardy (Lighting)
Resident Lighting Designer for 54 Below (2011-2025) & Joe’s Pub (2003-2011). Numerous off broadway and regional credits as a designer, , associate, & assistant. Love to Stew & Heidi. Let’s make some art and move some hearts.
Max Sedacca (Assistant)
Max is an actor, playwright, songwriter, designer, and storyteller originally from Dallas, Texas. There he attended Booker T Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and worked at Dallas Theater Center and Soul Rep Theatre Company. He attended Sarah Lawrence for college and that is where he took Stew’s class for 3 years. Since then, Max has worked around the city on and off Broadway and at the Museum of Broadway. He is so thankful to Stew for being an amazing mentor to him throughout the years and giving him this opportunity. He would also like to thank his family and his other mentor Guinea Bennett-Price.
Stew Stewart (songs)
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.