A Strange Loop


A Strange Loop is a musical with book, music and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson. The show had its world premiere Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons and ran from May 24 to July 28, 2019. The original cast recording was released on September 27, 2019 on Yellow Sound Label. The album peaked at number 6 on the Billboard Cast Albums chart.

Summary

The musical is about Usher, so named because of his day-job as an usher for The Lion King on Broadway, a fat, Black, gay writer as he tries to navigate the heteronormative white world.
He is backed by a six-person all-black ensemble who voice his inner thoughts as he begrudgingly ghost writes a new Tyler Perry stage play.

Cast and Characters

Musical numbers

On May 4, 2020, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to Jackson for the musical, with the committee citing the show as "A metafictional musical that tracks the creative process of an artist transforming issues of identity, race, and sexuality that once pushed him to the margins of the cultural mainstream into a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities." The show is the tenth musical to win the award, as well as the first musical written by a black person to win and first musical to win without a Broadway run.

Original Off-Broadway production