The shock of that sharp emotion strikes like a lance. It’s less vicariously exhausting than it was Off Broadway, perhaps because the company no longer wrecks itself physically with every performance - but it’s still furious, both with the world and itself.

“I was gonna use a bunch of her songs in the show but then she wouldn’t give me permission.”Īt breathtaking speed, for an hour and 45 minutes, Loop continues whirling on like this: the Big Ideas and the petty ones waltzing around in Jackson’s profane, hilarious, meta-musical carousel. “But it’s also the name of this Liz Phair song that I really love?” Usher tells the guy, flirting. That checks out, you think: Loop is an Escheresque musical by a gay Black man about a gay Black man writing a musical about a gay Black man writing about himself. As Usher, Jackson’s composer hero, sits on a subway explaining his own musical (also called A Strange Loop) to a stranger, he cites Douglas Hofstadter’s book about “loops” of identity-constructing self-reference. Of course there would be two - Jackson’s stunning show is recursive, redundant, reflective, reflexive. Jackson’s “Big Black and Queer-Ass American Broadway” show, he gives two explanations for the title. In the course of A Strange Loop, Michael R.

Jaquel Spivey (center) stars in A Strange Loop, at the Lyceum Theatre.