Ten years ago, even a diehard fan of music theatre would have been hard-pressed to name a musical whose cast and creators were all people of colour. But to paraphrase Dinah Washington, what a diff’rence a decade makes. This month in Melbourne you can catch two.

Hamilton needs no introduction, but the resident director of the Melbourne production of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s juggernaut is also putting the finishing touches on Passing Strange, another musical that changed the face of Broadway.

Passing Strange is the semi-autobiographical creation of US singer-songerwriter Stew, winning the former punk rocker a Tony and three Drama Desk awards. Its musical influences include punk rock, but also range as widely as gospel, neo-soul and even parodies of music theatre itself.

Director Dean Drieberg doesn’t like labelling Passing Strange a musical. A better term is “gig theatre”, he says, where audiences ask themselves, “Am I seeing a play or is this a concert with storytelling?” It’s a relatively rare form – he points to David Byrne’s Broadway show, American Utopia, and closer to home Malthouse Theatre’s Barbara and the Camp Dogs.

With a live band sharing the stage alongside a cast of nine, Passing Strange is undoubtedly a live music experience. But the punk rock energy is matched with a lyrical sophistication that is closer to theatre, says Drieberg.

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“It’s normally the simplicity of lyrics that makes something punk, but the lyrics and text written for Passing Strange are so incredible. There are moments when the cast are doing a read-through and there are certain pieces of dialogue within the show that completely blow my mind.”

The show’s title was inspired by a line from Othello, but where “passing” in Shakespeare’s era meant “very”, it has a very different resonance for people of colour. Passing Strange centres on a young African-American artist travelling through Europe, feeling at times the pressure of “passing” as more white, at others to exploit his blackness as a point of difference.

“Many people of colour have had versions of this in our own lives,” says Drieberg, “where you have to code switch to fit into whiter spaces, or times where you’re hired for a job because of your ethnicity, so you feel you lean more into that to fit that space.”