Usher is a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical: a piece about a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical...
Michael R. Jackson's blistering original musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons - not least of which are the punishing thoughts in his own head - in an attempt to understand his own strange loop.
A Strange Loop received its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in New York in 2019. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical at the 2022 Tony Awards - and every other 'Best Musical' award on Broadway. It received its British premiere at the Barbican Theatre, London, in 2023.
'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' Pulitzer Prize Committee
'Explosively imaginative. Dazzlingly one-of-a-kind' - Washington Post
'Audacious and uproarious... a meta masterpiece' - Guardian
'A dazzling ride. No measure of praise could be too much' - New York Times
'Screamingly funny. Unmissable. The musical we've been waiting for' - Time Out
'To watch this show is to enter, by some urgent, bawdy magic, an ecstatic and infinitely more colorful version of the famous surreal lithograph by M. C. Escher: the hand that lifts from the page, becoming almost real, then draws another hand, which returns the favor. Which came first? A Strange Loop is complex, teasing, thrilling' - New Yorker
'An exhilarating cocktail of hilarious lyrical complexity... Michael R. Jackson is a musical talent with deep wells of invention' - Time Out New York
'Brilliant... Harrowing... one-of-a-kind... Hyper-observant and hyper-verbal, Jackson lets his remorselessly satirical eye wander, to hilarious and devastating effect... What makes A Strange Loop so powerful, is not an attempt to find "our common humanity" but an insistence on speaking its own idiosyncratic truth' - Vogue
Best Musical & Best Book of a Musical, Tony Awards
Pulitzer Prize for Drama
