His six swarming Thoughts - including Daily Self Loathing (James Jackson Jr.), Sexual Ambivalence (L Morgan Lee), and Financial Faggotry (Antwayn Hopper) - nag and chasten him they pester him about his inability to finish his musical, to satisfy theater’s gatekeepers, and to pay his loans. (Jackson once ushered at The Lion King.) As Usher plays the Disney-ish return-to-your-seats chime, he also does battle with own brain. The plot, if that’s the right word for something so scattered, is about an usher named Usher (Jaquel Spivey) who works at a show much like The Lion King. Especially in the Lyceum Theatre: It’s a red-velvet-and-gilt balloon, and Jackson makes it go pop. The shock of that sharp emotion strikes like a lance. It’s less vicariously exhausting than it was Off Broadway, perhaps because the company no longer wrecks itself physically with every performance - but it’s still furious, both with the world and itself. “I was gonna use a bunch of her songs in the show but then she wouldn’t give me permission.”Īt breathtaking speed, for an hour and 45 minutes, Loop continues whirling on like this: the Big Ideas and the petty ones waltzing around in Jackson’s profane, hilarious, meta-musical carousel. “But it’s also the name of this Liz Phair song that I really love?” Usher tells the guy, flirting. That checks out, you think: Loop is an Escheresque musical by a gay Black man about a gay Black man writing a musical about a gay Black man writing about himself. As Usher, Jackson’s composer hero, sits on a subway explaining his own musical (also called A Strange Loop) to a stranger, he cites Douglas Hofstadter’s book about “loops” of identity-constructing self-reference. Of course there would be two - Jackson’s stunning show is recursive, redundant, reflective, reflexive.
Jackson’s “Big Black and Queer-Ass American Broadway” show, he gives two explanations for the title. In the course of A Strange Loop, Michael R.
Jaquel Spivey (center) stars in A Strange Loop, at the Lyceum Theatre.