A Strange Loop review: A musical within a musical that you can never second guess

Michael R Jackson’s acclaimed Broadway hit comes to the Barbican, and audiences don’t get an easy ride

The cast of ‘A Strange Loop' (Marc Brenner)

“Winner of every best musical award on Broadway,” scream the posters for A Strange Loop, so you might expect a musical aimed at the masses. But Michael R Jackson’s critically acclaimed production is not a show you can second guess. On the one hand, this is a “big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway show” as proclaimed in the opening number, all sparkling lights, jazz hands and a set reminiscent of Chicago’s sultry murder anthem “Cell Block Tango” (designed by Arnulfo Maldonado). On the other, it is both structurally and thematically knotty, exploring race dynamics, gay culture and class struggle, while also combining a sick humour with moments of poignancy. None of this is without design: A Strange Loop doesn’t give the audience an easy ride. There are periods when the show’s style threatens to drown out the story, but its emotional impact cannot be overstated.

A Strange Loop is a musical about a man writing about a man writing a musical – or “the portrait of a portrait of the artist as a young man”, as our hero (Kyle Ramar Freeman, who understudied the role on Broadway) puts it. He dreams of being a playwright while working as an usher at the Broadway production of The Lion King. Usher is his name too, the show’s action taking place in the short interval in that night’s show. It’s a framing device that pushes meta to the extreme; Usher points out the importance of an interval to make sure ticket holders don’t lose interest, but A Strange Loop sits at just under two hours. No interval.

Fortunately, there’s no chance of the Barbican audience getting bored. Keeping Usher company are his six “Thoughts” (Sharlene Hector, Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea, Yeukayi Ushe, Tendai Humphrey Sitima, Danny Bailey, Eddie Elliott), a chorus clad in dusky pink. Sometimes they inhabit the individual characters in Usher’s life, in other moments they morph into one communal character whose words are spread between them. In the upliftingly scored “We Wanna Know”, they become his god-fearing, gay-hating mother, asking seemingly innocent questions about his life, but with a hidden agenda.