‘A Strange Loop’s Michael R. Jackson And Producer Barbara Whitman On “Widening The Lane” For Broadway: “It’s OK To Be Weird”

deadline.com:

After A Strange Loop capped the Tony Awards by taking the Best Musical prize, playwright Michael R. Jackson offered his main takeaway from the show’s unlikely path to the top: “It’s OK to be weird.”Appearing in the press room with the show’s producer, Barbara Whitman, Jackson said he intended to take several steps to “try to widen the lane even more the kinds of shows that can be seen by audiences.” The book, music and lyrics for A Strange Loop, which captured the Pulitzer Prize for drama last year, were all written by Jackson.

Its metafictional plot centers on Usher, a Black, queer writer who is working on a musical about a Black, queer writer writing a musical about a Black, queer writer.

It was hardly a sure bet for the show to go from Off-Broadway to the pinnacle of the theater world.“So many artists operate from a place of fear and risk aversion,” Jackson said. “Even when I felt my most alone, I was always fearless about art.

So what I’m hoping is that people seeing the show, young artists and writers and actors, everybody who’s in musical theater, that maybe they’ll feel a little less afraid to be weird and to step out and to try something different.”Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (whom, Jackson joked, “is one of my inner white girls”) has a lyric “where she says, ‘You’ve got to try / If you’re feeling contempt / Well then you tell it / If you’re tired of the silent night / Jesus, well then you yell it.’ She’s saying, ‘Just do it.