The director of the show said, “The piece is larger than life, but it’s still life.” Her challenge has been to “keep the life part.”
More often than not, if the composer and playwright Michael R. Jackson was in or near the Lyceum Theatre after a performance of his suigeneris hit musical, “A Strange Loop,” during its recent Broadway run, fans and critics would gather around him, not just to have their Playbill autographed but to continue the conversation that the show had started. Usually, it takes an activist star, like Jane Fonda— or whoever is playing Aladdin—to cause a post-performance commotion outside a theatre. But a writer? A theatre nerd who wasn’t Lin-Manuel Miranda? A self-described “outsider’s outsider’s outsider” and a former usher for “The Lion King”? The protagonist of “A Strange Loop,” which closed in New York in January and opens at London’s Barbican in June, is, according to the script, a “fat, Black queer” man named Usher, who can barely support himself as he attempts to write a musical about the “strange loop”—the cycle of hope and rejection that his heart seems trapped in. Not exactly what you’d expect to be a box-office success. If anything, “A Strange Loop” is a show-biz story—complete with references to Stephen Sondheim and Scott Rudin—but it’s a show-biz story about how there is, in effect, no real stage to frame, let alone contain, an artist with Usher’s sensibilities (which is to say, Jackson’s): that is, until Jackson remade the American musical with “A Strange Loop.”
Esta historia es de la edición April 10, 2023 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición April 10, 2023 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
TRIPLE FAULT
A meal is never just a meal in a Luca Guadagnino movie; each bite is a prelude to a kiss, every feast a form of foreplay.
NIGHT MUSIC
“Stereophonic” and Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club” on Broadway.
LITTLE OLD HER
Is Taylor Swift doing too much?
BEASTLY MATTERS
Where the logic behind the concern for animal welfare begins and ends.
PULSE
He footed off his shoes, the logs balanced on an arm, and tugged the door shut.
TOWER IN FLAMES
What kind of right is academic freedom?
THE BATTLE FOR ATTENTION
How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age?
ON NATIVE GROUNDS
Deb Haaland faces the cruel history of the agency she now leads.
DESIGN FOR LIVING
Can converting office towers into apartments save empty downtowns from ruin?
HOROSCOPES WRITTEN BY MY MOTHER
Your zodiac alignment this month is governed by Venus, the planet of intuition, something my daughter Bess seems to lack.