‘A Strange Loop’ Broadway Review: Pulitzer-Winning Musical Ushers Newcomer Jaquel Spivey Into Spotlight

deadline.com:

Allow Usher, the central – only? – character of Michael R. Jackson’s scathingly funny and Pulitzer-Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop, to introduce himself.He is, he tells us, “a young overweight-to-obese homosexual and/or gay and/or queer, cisgender male, able-bodied university-and-graduate-school educated, musical theater writing, Disney ushering, broke-ass middle-class politically homeless normie leftist black American descendant of slaves who thinks he’s probably a vers bottom but not totally certain of that obsessing over the latest draft of his self-referential musical A Strange Loop!

And surrounded by his extremely obnoxious Thoughts!”Portrayed by Broadway newcomer Jaquel Spivey in a performance so comfortably inhabited you’d be forgiven for assuming he wrote it, Strange Loop‘s Usher takes his name from the stop-gap Lion King job that pays (barely) his bills while he writes the autobiographical musical of his dreams.

He is, in short (and in his words), “a black, gay man writing a musical about a black, gay man who’s writing a musical about a black gay man who’s writing a musical about a black gay man, etc.”While Usher is, in a sense, the sole character of A Strange Loop (opening tonight at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre), Spivey is not the only performer: He is surrounded by those “extremely obnoxious Thoughts” that swirl through his brain, never giving him a moment’s peace.

One is the voice of Daily Self-Loathing, another the Supervisor of Sexual Ambivalence, an agent aptly named Fairweather, various hookup dates, and other internal monitors who tell him he’s not Black enough or gay enough or thin enough or has enough money.And then there are his politically and religiously conservative Mom and Dad, forever yelling