ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS - YOUNG AND RESTLESS

Michael R. Jackson writes a soap-opera musical.

- HILTON ALS

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.”