A Strange Loop is a unique, unpredictable and important new queer musical – review
Where to begin with a show like A Strange Loop? Its reputation precedes it – having already picked up numerous Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and also the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, expectations have unsurprisingly been set very high.
It’s a relatively short show – this one-act (no interval) musical runs just shy of 100 minutes, and yet what it attempts in that limited timeframe is far more ambitious than pretty much anything else playing right now.
We’d like to succinctly summarise the plot but it’s not straightforward to explain. Our central character is a theatre usher called Usher (Kyle Ramar Freeman); a young black queer man living in New York, he is writing a musical about a black queer man.
In Usher’s show, this man is attempting to write a musical about a black queer man. It’s a cyclical piece – hence the ‘loop’ of the title – and if the story doesn’t sound meta enough already, it further pokes fun at the theatre industry, whether that’s at other shows, or the audiences that attend those shows – including the one watching A Strange Loop.
