The Pulitzer and Tony award-winning musical, A Strange Loop, explores blackness and queerness, race and sexuality, homophobia, identity and mental health. The book, music and lyrics are by Michael R Jackson. Semi-autobiographical, confessional, self-reverential,18 years in the making, complicated and challenging, it is definitely not a family-show.
Jackson was 23 and an usher in a Broadway theatre playing The Lion King when he came up with the idea of writing a musical about a Black queer writer writing a musical about a Black queer writer writing a musical.
The lead character is called Usher and he is locked in this strange unending loop. Humiliated, isolated and full of self-doubt, he longs for acceptance; even the black gay community finds him too fat and too feminine.
His dad is outraged. His mother, deeply religious, thinks homosexuality is a sin and wants him to write a nice gospel musical. His agent also thinks he should be writing something more commercial, such as a musical about slavery or police violence.
I was not prepared for the seriousness, the brutal in-your-face verbal and physical explicitness and the lacerating, howling self-loathing. The audience, I saw it with, took it all in their stride.
Usher is excellently acted and sung by Kyle Raymar Freeman, an American actor, who understudied and played Usher on Broadway. The thoughts in his head are played by six British actors who constantly invade the stage and encircle him.
A Strange Loop, directed by Stephen Brackett, lasts 100-minutes and is performed straight through without an interval. The limited run at the Barbican closes on September 9th.
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