Oh, and the performance just happens to be one of the most sensational of the Broadway season. He fears he might smell because a morning meeting with his landlord prevented him from taking a shower. His clothes are raggedy, his body is large and his sweat is torrential.
Spivey’s Usher commands the stage with the full force of his glorious difference. Existing tropes don’t fit his experience, but only through busting through them can he hope to discover an artistic vision large enough to contain his truth. Jackson doesn’t make it easy for his audience, but why should he when the world hasn’t made it easy for him to be himself? In “A Strange Loop,” he is seeking new forms to express what the old forms have left out. Black historical figures, such as Harriet Tubman and Marcus Garvey, indict Usher as a “race traitor” for acting superior to Tyler Perry.įamily members who don’t recognize their own homophobia are coopted into a scalding burlesque of a gospel play that erupts in a rousing chorus of “AIDS is God’s punishment.” The music is jubilant but the lyrics are satiric poison.
In the dreamscape of “A Strange Loop,” personal history bleeds into cultural politics. The rigid boundaries of identity are blurred as the ensemble fleshes out the stories tumbling out of Usher’s pressure-cooker mind. The queerness of “A Strange Loop” isn’t simply thematic. These performers, each one of them bringing distinctive vocal and theatrical individuality, give the musical a shapeshifting fluidity. This chorus line of pernicious self-talk is rounded out by John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey and Antwayn Hopper. Morgan Lee) represents Usher’s sexual ambivalence. Thought 2 (James Jackson Jr.) introduces himself as Usher’s Daily Self-Loathing. Surrounding Usher are personifications of his inner voices, six taunting denizens of his psyche that nag and mock, undermine and throw shade. Usher, as though filling out his own Grindr profile, describes his protagonist as “a young overweight-to-obese homosexual and/or gay and/or queer, cisgender male, able-bodied university-and-graduate-school educated, musical theater writing, Disney ushering, broke-ass middle-class politically homeless normie leftist Black American descendant of slaves who thinks he’s probably a vers bottom.” Or perhaps an autobiographical funhouse (of the kind that Adrienne Kennedy created in her landmark play “Funnyhouse of a Negro”) would serve as a better metaphor.
This musical, which is the one we’re watching, is indeed a hall of mirrors. What’s this long-aborning show that he’s been torturing himself about? “Well,” Usher reluctantly explains, “it’s about a Black, gay man writing a musical about a Black, gay man who’s writing a musical about a Black, gay man who’s writing a musical about a Black, gay man, etc.” He jokes that he can’t afford tickets to “Hamilton.” And his agent is proposing that he take a job as ghostwriter for one of Tyler Perry’s gospel shows, a career move that would go against everything he’s trying to achieve as an artist. His parents are questioning the point of his expensive education. Like Jonathan Larson’s surrogate in “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” Usher is in a desperate quest to write an original musical that will rescue him from poverty, obscurity and a looming sense of failure. Usher’s name is also his job description: When we first meet him, he’s dressed in a red uniform and getting Broadway theatergoers into their seats for Act 2 of “The Lion King.” “A Strange Loop” kaleidoscopically captures the struggle of a young artist named Usher (Jaquel Spivey in a titanic performance) who, like Jackson, is a musical theater scribe with an NYU pedigree. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical that probes the inner reality of a 26-year-old Black, queer artist who’s trying against the odds to transform his alienation into art.įor much of this triumphant, emotionally lacerating show, which had its official opening Tuesday at the Lyceum Theatre, I sat with my mouth agape, astonished and grateful that something so brutally honest and rigorously constructed had finally broken through to a Broadway stage. I never thought I’d see anything on Broadway quite like “A Strange Loop,” Michael R.