Although Beguiling and Funny, This Meta Exercise Has Aged a Bit Since 2019

It has been a relief in this Broadway season to welcome more than a couple of musicals that offer not only new songs but truly original premises. “Six” finds the wives of Henry VIII competing to determine who had it the hardest. In “Flying Over Sunset,” Cary Grant, Claire Luce Boothe, and Aldous Huxley drop LSD together. (All three did use the drug, Huxley most famously.)No new musical, though, has boasted a more unique foundation than “A Strange Loop,” which was also inspired by the life of a real person: Michael R. Jackson, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics. This Mr. Jackson bears no relation to the late pop superstar or any of his kin, or to anyone historically or currently famous, as far as I know. The musical’s protagonist, called Usher — no connection to that singer, either, but rather a reference to the character’s job in a Broadway theater — is, as he explains, simply 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.”This very meta exercise garnered lavish praise when “Loop” had its premiere off-Broadway in 2019, with a splendid cast under Stephen Brackett’s exuberant direction. The work earned a Pulitzer Prize for drama the following year, making it one of only 10 musicals — and the first crafted by a black artist — to achieve that honor. I too was a believer, finding the show thrillingly fresh. With the exception of Jaquel Spivey, who makes an energetic and endearing Broadway debut as Usher, the company appearing in the current production, again helmed by Mr. Brackett, is identical and the material hasn’t been substantially revised. So I’m hard-pressed to explain how a musical that I found funny, poignant and beguiling three years ago — and still do, to a large extent — could now also strike me as smug and self-righteous.Perhaps the timing is to blame. Pedantry and navel-gazing have become ever more prevalent in our culture, with celebrities and social media junkies oversharing personal details and preaching to their separate choirs. “A Strange Loop” was always self-indulgent; how could it be otherwise, when the supporting characters essentially live inside Usher’s head? These six “Thoughts” introduce themselves early on and are brought to vivid, often hilarious life by L Morgan Lee, James Jackson Jr., John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey, and Antwayn Hopper. They bear titles such as “Your Daily Self-Loathing,” “Your Sexual Ambivalence,” and a couple of others that, like chunks of Mr. Jackson’s extremely spicy dialogue, I can’t cite here.Other characters take shape through the Thoughts, and they seem provincial at best. Usher’s mother, while clearly loving, is a religious zealot and an inveterate gossip who worries only that her baby will contract AIDS. His father is an alcoholic who thinks that Usher’s homosexuality will make his son attracted to him.Usher’s caricatures only grow more extreme as he imagines writing a gospel musical for the hugely successful black filmmaker Tyler Perry, proffered here as a recurring symbol of banality and exploitation. The “white gaytriarchy,” as Mr. Jackson refers to it, also takes a hit, with one scene painting a racist predator in excruciating detail.Mr. Jackson’s scorn is mitigated, fortunately, by his self-awareness, and by a gift for channeling both his frustration and his own insecurity into lyrical songs and trenchant, exhilarating comedy. In one of the musical’s funniest scenes, a squadron of black icons ranging from Harriet Tubman to James Baldwin to Whitney Houston materializes to chastise Mr. Jackson for disrespecting Mr. Perry.The theatrically savvy score clearly also owes a debt to what Mr. Jackson calls his “inner white girl” (the title of one song) and to singer/songwriters such as that most soulful of white girls, Joni Mitchell, who gets a shout-out at one point. So does a far lesser musician, the ’90s indie rock darling Liz Phair, who herself recorded a song called “Strange Loop.”The musical’s title also refers to a term coined by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter. “It’s basically about how your sense of self is a kind of paradox,” Usher says. Certainly, “A Strange Loop” makes one eager to see where Mr. Jackson’s considerable talents will take him when he ventures further outside that paradox.

Although Beguiling and Funny, This Meta Exercise Has Aged a Bit Since 2019

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