LOS ANGELES — When we first meet Usher, the gay Black character at the center of the musical “A Strange Loop,” he’s working as an usher and writing a musical — about a gay Black usher writing a musical.
It’s a familiar loop for creator Michael R. Jackson, who worked as a Broadway usher.
He began writing the piece as a “thinly veiled confessional monologue,” but he worked to make it something more significant than himself over the next 18 years of writing and rewriting.
“It was about the experience of a young person who sort of felt unseen and unheard and misunderstood and was trying to find his place in the world,” Jackson explained.
It’s not an easy journey. Usher is surrounded by intrusive thoughts, with names like Daily Self-Loathing, plus a family that constantly criticizes his work and his sexuality.
“It ain’t right, it ain’t right, it ain’t right with God,” an actor playing his mother sings, alternately caressing his face and calling him her baby boy.
“This was the thing that I wrote as a life raft for myself,” Jackson said. “I felt so lost and I felt so afraid and so confused. I wanted to try to create something, so I had a little ark, you know, while I was sort of lost … in the flood of the world.”
During its first week at the Ahmanson, Center Theatre Group held two special performances, a Black Out Night and a Pride Night.
The musical sits at the intersection, and artistic director Snehal Desai was excited to welcome these communities into conversation with pre-show information and post-show talkbacks. Having known Jackson for two decades, he had seen early readings of the musical, which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Musical.
Desai says he knew Jackson’s voice would have a “tremendous impact.”
“The story he tells of a queer man of color and what it’s like is so poignant and audacious and bold and also just groundbreaking in terms of musical theater,” Desai said.
Jackson’s voice and the voices that surround him are raw and visceral, with lyrics detailing how Usher has to “fight for his right to live in a world that chews up and spits out Black queers on the daily.”
Arts Advocate Ricky Abilez, who attended pride night, said it is vital to have this kind of work in a theatre as big as the Ahmanson.
“It’s more important than ever to tell queer stories,” they said. “Especially when trans and queer people are under attack across the country on a daily basis.”
In fact, according to FBI crime data, Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes jumped 19% from 2021 to 2022. Abilez didn’t know much about the show going in, but after, they called it “a gift.”
“It’s powerful,” they said. “You don’t see queer stories like this on stage. You don’t see queer bodies like this on stage, especially Black bodies.”
Jackson says a lot has changed over the nearly two decades he spent writing “A Strange Loop,” for better and for worse, and he doesn’t think one musical can address all of it. What he hopes, though, is that this very personal story can be the life raft he once needed for other young people struggling with their inner thoughts and external forces.
“I hope that this show…can show that in a world of great tumult, one still can sort of put one foot in front of the other and try to make sense of the darkness around them,” Jackson said. “That young people, particularly young people who might be struggling with self-esteem issues, that they see that there’s a way…to make sense of the things in the world that don’t seem to make sense.”
Breaking the cycle of self-loathing to make room for acceptance and joy.