NEW YORK, NY.- A Strange Loop, Michael R. Jacksons Pulitzer Prize-winning meta-musical, is coming to Broadway this spring.
The shows producers announced Monday that the musical would run at the Lyceum Theater; they did not announce specific dates, but it is planning to open before the eligibility deadline for this seasons Tony Awards, which is expected to be in late April.
The show is a self-referential musical comedy about a Black gay musical theater writer trying to write a musical about a Black gay musical theater writer. Unsparingly introspective and sexually straightforward, it was staged off-Broadway in 2019 at Playwrights Horizons in a collaboration with Page 73 Productions. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it jubilantly anguished and said it featured an assortment of the kind of infectious, richly harmonic melodies that would have your grandparents leaving the theater humming. That is, if they hadnt walked out before.
The musical went on to win the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in drama, and was described by the Pulitzers as a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities.
Since November, A Strange Loop has been running at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, where it received a rave review from The Washington Post. Critic Peter Marks called it marvelously inventive and exhilarating.
Jackson said he was delighted to see the musical find a home on Broadway. I think its significant because this show is one that made its way out of nowhere, and stuck to its guns and to itself, he said. That doesnt happen often with new musicals.
And does he believe the musical can succeed in a Broadway dominated by jukebox musicals and adaptations of movies? The challenge I laid out for myself is that A Strange Loop is a big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway show, he said. I believe we can entice audiences from all over to come take part.
The musical is directed by Stephen Brackett and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly; the Broadway cast has not yet been announced. The Broadway run will be produced by Barbara Whitman.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.