Pity the ushers at A Strange Loop, condemned to become one more layer of reality rubbing away against fiction in a show determined to make the distinction disappear. This extraordinary musical is about an usher, called Usher, who’s a fat, black, gay musical theatre writer writing a musical about a fat, black, gay musical theatre writer writing a musical about… well, as the show puts it: et cetera. Coincidentally, the show’s writer Michael R Jackson also fits the above descriptors.
More than a decade in the making, the show hit Broadway in 2022, and now Usher crosses the pond with a suitcase full of awards including a Tony for Best New Musical, and even the Pulitzer Prize. The pressure for Stephen Brackett’s production to land over here – especially when people like Billy Porter and Steven Spielberg have put money into it – is enormous, and yet the show is stuffed with jokes about American culture. Tyler Perry? Popeye’s chicken?
Turns out, the US-specific stuff doesn’t matter. You’d be better off coming armed with Urban Dictionary, because this is probably the filthiest, most explicit show in London at the moment, dripping with bodily fluids and stiffened with extreme sexual fantasies, all part of the confused trauma of Usher’s mind. It’s also one of the most thrillingly strange, playful and hilarious new musicals to have hit a London stage in recent years.
Suffused with details from Jackson’s own life, through catchy songs – pulling on everything from gospel to Sondheim and Tori Amos – and savage humour (”I just wish the protagonist was someone I can imagine shagging”) we’re shoved into Usher’s head and crushed by the weight of expectations put upon him: religion, sexuality, parents, skin colour.
Kyle Ramar Freeman plays Usher with a wonderful tenderness at first that slowly boils then bubbles over; his resonant, high voice nailing both the quiet moments and the vast, melismatic outbursts that are required by the end.
A chorus of six ‘Thoughts’ plays the rest of the characters in Usher’s mind, from self-berating entities like ‘Daily Self Loathing’ to caricatured depictions of Usher’s religious, homophobic parents, to six-packed fantasy men on the subway, all while Usher tries to write the musical that we’re watching.
They’re childlike and cruel, these Thoughts, enacting Raja Feather Kelly’s wonderfully precise choreography: it’s full of queer-literate poses and gestures, beautiful snapshots set against six doorframes that initially comprise the set. No one is safe from Usher’s thoughts. Hamilton, the Lion King, Tyler Perry and, eventually, all of us in the audience get a roasting, that harshness cut through with a vein of mordant humour.
But Brackett’s production is like an Escher painting, endlessly escalating. When you think the show has shot its wad, in a slightly sagging middle, the purgatorial set expands into something terrifying. The costumes become more elaborate, the sets get bigger, until we enter a hellscape vision of internalised homophobia, racism, despair: Usher stands in front of a towering gospel church set, the word ‘HIV’ in hell-red letters, and we’re told to clap along while a gospel preacher sings “AIDS is God’s punishment”. By that point we’ve been wrung through so many cycles of irony, self-reference and sincerity that it’s difficult to know what to take from it.
Besides, what can you say about a show that is its own harshest critic? Maybe, simply this: it’s stuffed with really catchy tunes full of triumphant melodies, with big high notes, snatches of literary and musical reference constantly winking at us. It’s messy and exhausting as much as it is spectacular. It’s too long, too repetitious, too much - and I’d watch it again in an instant.
