The meta-musical about a gay Black man writing a musical about a gay Black man writing a musical is an odd tale immersed with pop culture humor.
When Michael R. Jackson’s debut musical “A Strange Loop” premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, it was an immediate sensation.
The show was Jackson’s first professional production, though he quickly followed it up with two more musicals, “White Girl in Danger” in 2023 and “Teeth” just a month ago, based on the 2007 vagina dentata horror movie. Jackson wrote the book, lyrics and music for “A Strange Loop,” but it wasn’t a musical when he started writing it.
“I got in as an aspiring lyricist and book writer,” Jackson says. “I was not thinking about being a composer at that time. I was musically inclined, but I was not a songwriter, because I didn’t understand song form. At the end of the first year, we had a class with the composer Mike Reid, and he said, if you’re a lyricist who’s never written music or a composer who’s never written lyrics and you want to try it, go for it.
“There was this older woman who came in and went down the aisle,” Jackson says. “And she turned and she goes, “Usher! Usher!,” like she was hailing a taxi. And I stole that from whoever that woman was.” The musical takes its name from a Liz Phair song, just as the song “Exile in Gayville” in the show is a play on Phair’s album title “Exile in Guyville.”
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