The scene in New York looks barely less provincial. Usher fled a family and community in Detroit that probably would have driven him to unsafe sex or suicide (one song quietly memorializes “Black gay boys who chose to go on back to the Lord”). Our hero’s unfulfilling romantic life (think Company but with the worst sex in the world) lead him into self-loathing fantasies about a hunky white flirt on the subway, and sordid realities such as a hookup with a married guy in Inwood who mutters racist dirty talk and the n-word while plowing Usher on his bed. Spivey and this wildly talented sextet weave their way fearlessly through Jackson’s tangy salad of show tunes, singer-songwriter pop, Hair -style anthems, and post-Sondheim noodling. The actors playing the Thoughts, and a blizzard of other figures in Usher’s life, are the obscenely versatile and vivacious Antwayn Hopper, L Morgan Lee, John-Michael Lyles, James Jackson, Jr., John-Andrew Morrison, and Jason Veasey. When not standing around a Disney-run lobby in a silly red uniform, tapping a tiny xylophone to signal end of intermission, Usher’s home on his computer, sweating over his “big, black and queer-ass American Broadway show.” Interrupting the writer’s focus are six bitchy Thoughts that pelt him with self-doubt, financial worry, sexual confusion and other cheery topics. Usher gets his name from the fact that he is an usher at The Lion King. It’s a musical fever dream, more an expressionist song cycle than a traditional book show. That might sound like a spoiler, but A Strange Loop (gracefully staged by Stephen Brackett) is driven by anything but plot. With the achingly wistful final notes of A Strange Loop, our much-harassed hero, Usher (Jaquel Spivey) comes to the liberating thought that identity and change may only be an illusion.
By the end of MJ, we don’t know if Michael’s gay, asexual, or criminally messed up, but his music transports us across generations. Both stories poke and prod at Black male sexuality they trace the lifelong scars that domineering parents leave they dramatize the misfit in a label-crazy world and they allow their heroes and audience to escape ugliness through art, which doesn’t make the pain go away, but clears space for ambiguity.