Usher is trying to develop his own musical - about a Disney usher who’s writing an original musical about an usher who’s writing a musical, and so on - as he deals with the impositions of his mind, which are personified as six Greek-chorus-like “Thoughts” who voice his desires and cutting internal commentary. (In the memory palace of his mind, his relatives are named for “Lion King” characters: His mother and father are called Sarabi and Mufasa, his niece is Nala, his ne’er-do-well brother is Scar.) He “writes stories and songs and wants desperately to be heard.” The story concerns Usher ( played with vulnerability, charm and delicacy by Jaquel Spivey), a 25-year-old “fat American Black gay man of high intelligence, low self-image and deep feelings.” Like his creator, Usher works as an usher for “The Lion King” and shares his name with a pop star. Jackson says that the show is not autobiographical but “self-referential,” though the parallels between him and his protagonist are striking. The show is a product of Jackson’s own vicissitudinous loops: his fits and starts of success and failure, when he was working, for five years, as an usher at “The Lion King” and “Mary Poppins” while revising his own play over and over and over again, trying not to give up. Jackson is dead set against contemporary virtuousness: a puritanical need for fixed, context-repellent delineations of right and wrong. In his 1979 book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” Hofstadter coined the term “a strange loop” to describe the recursive nature of selfhood and intelligence. The title carries its own layers of reference: to Liz Phair’s 1993 song “Strange Loop” and to the work of Douglas Hofstadter, the scholar of cognitive science and comparative literature. Jackson relishes the playfulness at work in these kinds of appropriations, and the show bristles with references as varied as Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise the writing of bell hooks Dan Savage, the advice columnist “Hamilton” Stephen Sondheim. “A Strange Loop,” which is being marketed as a “big, Black, queer-ass American musical,” is in part about how identity is cobbled together out of the flotsam of pop culture: how the faces we present to the world are neither organic nor stolen, but co-opted, borrowed and reshaped in the borrowing. And I think that maybe it’s given me a certain kind of confidence, perhaps, as somebody in the entertainment world because ‘Michael Jackson’ stands for pop excellence and razzmatazz and razzle-dazzle, and that’s certainly something that I aspire to in my own work.” There’s a certain excitement that comes up, and maybe I’ve been able to utilize that.
“And yet, there’s something about his legacy that is invoked whenever my name comes up. But we’re two very different artists working in two very different traditions.” He paused, punctuating his thinking with ellipsis, his voice relaxed and slowly propulsive, as if his sentences were bridges he was building as he walked over them. “Certainly whenever my name is mentioned, the ghost of him appears somewhere.
Jackson has embraced the absurdity of the coincidence - his website name and Instagram handle is “thelivingmichaeljackson,” for example. That’s been both an annoyance and a help.” “When I say that, I mean that, my whole identity as a person just in the world, has always been sort of tied to that man, because of our names. “See what I did there?” He stopped, started again, wanting to clarify. He chuckled, his buoyant, lisp-tinged laughter calling to mind fluttering shirttails. “It’s a strange loop,” Jackson told me on the phone when I mentioned the coincidence. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning metafictional musical, which premiered on Broadway in April. This image advertised “A Strange Loop,” the playwright Michael R. Seven blocks away, at the Lyceum Theater on 45th Street, another sign bore the name “Michael Jackson” and an illustration of a 20-something Black man’s head in semi-profile, with six tiny bodies floating around his face and hair. On 52nd Street, at the Neil Simon Theater, where “MJ: The Musical” has been running since December, there’s a graphic of the King of Pop in his iconic early ’90s pose: fedora perched low, obscuring his face shirttails flying in the artificial wind white glove high-water pants sparkling socks feet en pointe. ĭuring a walk along the Great White Way this winter, I saw something peculiar: two marquees advertising two Michael Jacksons.
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