Michael R Jackson’s “meta” musical is as smart and slippery as it was hailed to be on Broadway. A Black, queer, New York theatre usher (Kyle Ramar Freeman) is writing a play about a Black queer man who, in turn, is writing a play about a Black queer man. So it draws its circles within circles, looping impressively without any contrivance, although there is great intellectual and emotional complication within the loops.
Usher is a sweet, vulnerable twentysomething whose opening number, Intermission Song, sings of travelling through the world “in a fat, Black, queer body.” As familiar as its exploration of identity politics may sound, it is given highly original, often entertaining, treatment with no hint of clunky polemic.
