That monologue was about a young Black gay man walking around New York assessing his life, his career trajectory, and his worth as a Black gay man who is “too fat,” “too femme,” and “too Black” for the culture. The origins of Jackson’s crowning achievement have become somewhat mythic: Shortly after graduating from New York University’s Dramatic Writing Program in 2002, a 21-year-old Jackson wrote a thinly veiled monologue, a coping mechanism for his career anxiety as a fresh-out-of-college playwright called “Why I Can’t Get Work,” that became the kernel for the show. Accompanying Usher is a Greek chorus of six “Thoughts,” played to perfection by the spectacular sextet of L Morgan Lee, James Jackson Jr., John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey, and Antwayn Hopper, each of them contrasting, conspiring against, or calling him out at every turn. The character’s name is both a reference to the blockbuster-selling R&B singer-songwriter and to the day job the character holds at The Lion King on Broadway, counting down intermissions while assisting entitled wealthy patrons to their seats and dreaming up his breakthrough show we spend the majority of the show in his mind.
It feels like a miracle or magical, or something otherworldly, that that could happen.”Ī Strange Loop follows Usher (played Jaquel Spivey in his first professional gig out of college), a 25-going-on-26-year-old “overweight-to-obese” Black queer musical theatre writer making a musical about a 25-going-on-26-year-old “overweight-to-obese” Black queer musical theatre writer, ad infinitum. So it’s just wild, all that manifesting and that sort of artistic rigor ended up resulting in the show going to Broadway. I was trying to make what felt like a Broadway show to me-my version of what that was supposed to be. The seeds for that ending were planted, he thinks, when he added the lyric to the opening number calling what we were about see a “Big, Black, and queer-ass American Broadway show.” He confessed, “Even when I wrote that, I didn’t think the show was going to Broadway, and that wasn’t even what I was trying to do. “I told the room that day that it was really amazing that this thing I wrote alone in a room up the stairs of this little old lady in a bungalow house in the middle of nowhere in Jamaica, Queens-that I wrote this monologue as a little life raft for myself on my little Compaq Presario laptop-somehow, over the years, blossomed into this mighty ship that landed on Broadway.”
“It was a really exciting and emotional day,” Jackson, 41, recalled from the Washington Heights apartment he’s lived in for 15 years.
That Wednesday before opening, Jackson was thinking back to the beginning of rehearsals.
Sales have been strong, and last night’s Tony wins-for Jackson as the show’s book writer, and A Strange Loop as best musical-are sure to bolster the show’s fortunes. It opened just two weeks later, on April 26, becoming a bona fide critical smash, with Jackson being celebrated for the musical’s craftsmanship, fearlessness, and unbridled humanity. Originally scheduled to start previews on April 6, the production launched instead on April 12, just in time for the show’s understudies to spring into action and for Jackson to make revisions. That meant less time for Jackson to finesse scenes and songs, causing a burst of small panic behind the scenes. His idiosyncratic, existential, metafictional musical A Strange Loop was days away from opening, after the creative team had been forced to cancel a first preview performance when COVID-19 cases were discovered within the company. On a cloudy Wednesday morning, less than a week before he was to make his overdue, pandemic-postponed Broadway debut, musical theatre writer Michael R.