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LOS ANGELES, CA (June 4, 2024) — The Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-Winning acclaimed
musical A Strange Loop is coming to the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles for a limited four week engagement through Sunday, June 30, 2024. A Strange Loop features book, music, and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson and directed by Tony Award nominee Stephen Brackett. Tickets and information are available at CenterTheatreGroup.org.
Meet Usher: a Black, queer writer writing a musical about a Black, queer writer writing a musical about a Black, queer writer. Michael R. Jackson’s blisteringly funny masterwork exposes the heart and soul of a young artist grappling with desires, identity, and instincts he both loves and loathes. Hell-bent on breaking free of his own self-perception, Usher wrestles with the thoughts in his head, brought to life on stage by a hilarious, straight-shooting ensemble. Direct from Broadway and the West End to San Francisco and Los Angeles, A Strange Loop is the big, Black, and queer-ass Great American Musical for all!
“I began writing what would become A Strange Loop in a small room of a bungalow-style apartment in the middle of nowhere Queens when I was 23-years-old,” said Michael R. Jackson. “I had never been so scared or uncertain of my place in the world. Working on the show was my life raft and I never in a million years imagined the miles it would travel. I am so excited to share A Strange Loop with even more audiences. What a strange loop!”
“It only seems fitting that such a big, bold, and irreverent play would call CTG home—our iconic theatre company known for pushing boundaries and telling wholly original stories,” said CTG Artistic Director Snehal Desai. “A Strange Loop is one of the most discussed and awarded musicals of our time. It is also audacious, hilarious, empowering, and very moving. The company joins us from a national search and I can’t wait for CTG-Ahmanson Theatre audiences to experience A Strange Loop.”
The cast of A Strange Loop includes (in alphabetical order): Dave J. Abrams (Understudy, Thought 2 & 3), Angela Alise (Understudy, Thought 1), Jordan Barbour (Thought 5), J. Cameron Barnett (Thought 2), Carlis Shane Clark (Understudy, Thought 5 & 6), Alvis Green Jr. (Usher Alternate), Albert Hodge (Understudy, Thought 4), Avionce Hoyles (Thought 3), Tarra Conner Jones (Thought 1), Malachi McCaskill (Usher), Jamari Johnson Williams (Thought 6), and Tony Award nominee John-Andrew Morrison (Thought 4).
Members of the A Strange Loop’s Broadway creative team will join the West Coast engagements. They include Raja Feather Kelly (Choreography), Tony award nominee Arnulfo Maldonado (Scenic Design), Montana Center Theatre Group and American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco are co-presenting this production, which performs at A.C.T.’s Toni Rembe Theater prior to Los Angeles April 18 to May 12Levi Blanco (Costume Design), Tony Award nominee Drew Levy (Sound Design), Tony Award nominee Jen Schreiver (Lighting Design), Aaron Tacy (Associate Lighting Design), Candace Taylor (Associate Choreography), Cookie Jordan (Hair, Wig, and Makeup Design), Chelsea Pace (Intimacy), and The Telsey Office / Destiny Lilly, CSA (Casting).
A Strange Loop made its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in May 2019. In December 2021, the show had a critically acclaimed run at Washington D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company prior to coming to Broadway in spring 2022. A Strange Loop won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was the recipient of 11 Tony Award nominations, the most of any show in 2022. The production took home the Tony Award for Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical. A Strange Loop was also named Best Musical by New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Drama League, and Off-Broadway Alliance. A Strange Loop recently played a limited 12-week engagement at London’s Barbican Theatre.
This company of A Strange Loop is a co-presentation between Center Theatre Group and American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, which presented it at A.C.T.’s Toni Rembe Theater prior to Los Angeles April 18 to May 12.
The critics have been ecstatic about A Strange Loop. Dave Quinn said in Entertainment Weekly, Grade A. “What Michael R. Jackson has created with A Strange Loop is nothing short of astounding. The saying ‘You’ve never seen anything like this before’ is often overused … but when it comes to A Strange Loop, the shattering, electrifying debut
musical from Jackson, the phrase would be an understatement.” Tim Bano said The Standard (London), “***** (highest rating). I’d watch it again in an instant. This
extraordinary musical is one of the most thrillingly strange, playful and hilarious new musicals to have hit a London stage in recent years. it’s stuffed with really catchy tunes full of triumphant melodies.”
Naveen Kumar said in Variety, “It’s like stepping back to admire an extraordinary portrait of the artist as a tangle of contradictions, desires and painful memories. In other words, it’s like the experience of life itself.”
Reviewing the show on Broadway, Charles McNulty said in the Los Angeles Times, “For much of this triumphant, emotionally lacerating show, I sat astonished and grateful that something so brutally honest and rigorously constructed had finally broken through to a Broadway stage … Jackson liberates us from the homogeneity that deadens our theaters and leaves so many of us feeling alone. For those searching for reflections of themselves in culture, A Strange Loop offers the balm of community. Broadway has never felt so expansively welcoming.”
The New York Times, gave it a Critic’s Pick. Maya Phillips wrote, “There is no measure of praise that could be too much. Searing and softhearted, uproarious and disquieting, A Strange Loop pulls off an amazing feat: condensing a complex idea, full of paradoxes and abstractions, into the form of a Broadway musical — after all, this is a show that allows a Black gay man to be vulnerable onstage without dismissing or fetishizing his trauma, desires and creative ambitions.”
Mark Kennedy said in the Associated Press, “Every once and a while — we get something that pushes the musical theater form completely, taking [us on] an utterly unforgettable, idiosyncratic trip. Add Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop to the list that includes Fun Home and Angels in America, both of which have echoes here. Like them, it is astonishing, challenging and awesome. May A Strange Loop run as long as The Lion King!”
Helen Shaw said in Vulture,“Big Ideas and the petty ones waltz around in Jackson’s profane, hilarious, meta-musical carousel … the fabulous, piety-smashing Loop still feels as exhilarating as your first trip on the merry-go-round.”
Tickets for A Strange Loop are available through CenterTheatreGroup.org, Audience Services at (213) 972-4400 or in person at the Center Theatre Group Box Offices (at the Ahmanson Theatre) at The Music Center, 135 N. Grand Avenue in Downtown L.A. 90012.
