A Strange Loop

 

Broadway is a bit out of reach for me, right now, so exploring the wonder that is the Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop has been limited to Spotify.

The show by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson is a torrid and tuneful treatise on race, religion and sexuality, that uses these constructs as both social phenomena and metaphors.

The main character, presumably Jackson's alter ego, is a theater usher named Usher (Jaquel Spivey), who is struggling with his identity and with his creative voice, which he feels is stifled because he is a Black gay man who feels disassociated from all of these things, his family and the theater world.

Usher interacts with a chorus of a half-dozen singers, also identified in the lyrics as Black and queer, who at various times play his conflicted thoughts, disapproving family members, random sex partners and other associates in Usher's life.

Jackson's songs are complex and narratively dense, the language might be startlingly frank for some listeners but the vulgarity is not gratuitous; it is rooted in the story's world of sexual repression, anger and falseness.

Those who admire the work of Hollywood A-lister Tyler Perry might find Jackson's labelling the actor/director/producer as a low-balling hack (my words) is unfair. But as one who agrees with Jackson's assessment of the mogul, I think Perry's world is a powerful emblem of Usher's predicament. That is, Usher can't be who he is, a Black queer man, when the model of Black male theatrical success is a man whose world denies Usher's reality and demands that he conform or resign himself to obscurity.