‘Strange Loop,’ the improbable Broadway sensation, opens in SF

When Michael R. Jackson’s debut musical “A Strange Loop” premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, it was an immediate sensation.

A musical about a Black gay man writing a musical about a Black gay man, the show combines captivating metafiction with hilarious pop culture commentary, bawdy sexuality and deeply touching doubts and introspection. Usher, an usher for “The Lion King,” is plagued by nagging Thoughts that take on the roles of his parents and others in barraging him with pretty much every insecurity he has.

Now making its West Coast premiere at American Conservatory Theater, “A Strange Loop” won the 2020 the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the first musical by a Black person to win the award (and only the 10th musical ever so honored) and then went on to win a Tony Award for Best Musical for its 2022 Broadway run.

The show was Jackson’s first professional production, though he quickly followed it up with two more musicals, “White Girl in Danger” in 2023 and “Teeth” just a month ago, based on the 2007 vagina dentata horror movie.

Following close on the heels of a West End run last year, the ACT production reunites almost all of the Broadway creative team, including director Stephen Brackett, choreographer Raja Feather Kelly and all the designers. The cast is almost entirely new except John-Andrew Morrison in his Tony-nominated role as Thought 4.

ACT is presenting “A Strange Loop” in a coproduction with Center Theatre Group, which will bring it to Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre in June.

Jackson wrote the book, lyrics and music for “A Strange Loop,” but it wasn’t a musical when he started writing it.

“I had graduated from NYU’s Dramatic Writing Program in 2003, and I was not prepared for the real world at all with a BFA in playwriting,” Jackson recalls. “I moved to the middle of nowhere in Jamaica, Queens, to this old lady’s house, and I just was overwhelmed by life. I was 22 years old, and I just was trying to find my way. And so I sat down and started writing ‘Why I Can’t Get Work,’ which was a thinly veiled personal monologue about what it was like to be a young Black gay man at that time.”

Not long after that, Jackson returned to New York University to get his MFA in the Musical Theater Writing Program.

“I got in as an aspiring lyricist and book writer,” Jackson says. “I was not thinking about being a composer at that time. I was musically inclined, but I was not a songwriter, because I didn’t understand song form. At the end of the first year, we had a class with the composer Mike Reid, and he said, if you’re a lyricist who’s never written music or a composer who’s never written lyrics and you want to try it, go for it. And so I wrote the song called ‘Memory Song,’ which would later make its way into ‘A Strange Loop’ but at that time was just a standalone song.”

Jackson continued writing songs, a number of which found their place in the story he had begun as a monologue.

All kinds of experiences that Jackson had made their way into “A Strange Loop.” Like the main character, he also worked as an usher for “The Lion King” on Broadway.

“There was this older woman who came in and went down the aisle,” Jackson says. “And she turned and she goes, “Usher! Usher!,” like she was hailing a taxi. And I stole that from whoever that woman was.”

There’s also a whole thread in the musical about filmmaker Tyler Perry. Usher’s mother wants him to do a Perry-style gospel play, culminating in a scathing satire of Perry’s work.

“I won the Pulitzer in May of 2020, so we were all just in our houses,” Jackson says. “And a friend of mine said Tyler was trying to get in contact with me. And then the next day, while I was on the phone with my mom, he called me. So I got on the phone with Tyler, and he congratulated me on winning the Pulitzer and on the quote-unquote historic nature of the win. And he sort of half-jokingly said that he was gonna beat my ass. We talked and he was very nice, and then he texted me right after we hung up to show me that he had purchased the off-Broadway cast album and that he had listened to the song ‘Tyler Perry Writes Real Life.’ But he never saw the show.”

The musical takes its name from a Liz Phair song, just as the song “Exile in Gayville” in the show is a play on Phair’s album title “Exile in Guyville.”

“There used to be this whole big storyline within the piece about Usher trying to get Liz Phair to give him permission to use her music in his musical,” Jackson says. “I’d written a bunch of songs that were mashups of songs from Liz Phair’s catalog.”

The Phair connection didn’t stay in the show, but Jackson cites her as one of his major songwriting influences, along with Tori Amos and Joni Mitchell.

“I call those three ladies my triumvirate,” Jackson says. “Joni is the mother, Liz is the daughter, Tori is the Holy Ghost. All three of them inspired me in different ways. But there’s also so many other influences within the piece, like the Clark Sisters and gospel and R&B and 70s soul music. I’m sort of a repository for all the music I love.”

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

‘A STRANGE LOOP’

Book, music and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson, presented by American Conservatory Theater

Through: May 12

Where: ACT’s Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco

Tickets: $25-$137; www.act-sf.org