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.
Engagingly directed by Stephen Brackett, six figures around Usher represent his inner thoughts including sexual ambivalence and self-loathing. While the material plumbs dark depths, the choreography by Raja Feather Kelly is upbeat and humorous and the set dazzles – Usher’s love affair with musical theatre is made manifest through Arnulfo Maldonado’s lightbulbs and glitter, an initially simple stage design pulling out some big surprises at the end.
The music and lyrics, also written by Jackson, come with a pop or R&B beat though are sometimes inflected with an emo sound. The book and lyrics carry the power of this production and it is clear to see why Jackson’s script won a Pulitzer prize for drama.
An intimate play about selfhood and artistic creation, it is full of paradoxes: camply funny with arch songs such as Inner White Girl, it is also painful to watch as Usher comes up against heinous racism in the gay dating world as well as homophobia in his church-going family. Sexually and racially explicit with repeated use of the N-word, there are graphic jokes about anal sex and Aids (with the repeated notion that Aids is “God’s punishment”), and the play uses Black stereotypes and caricatures, although remarkably, none of this feels gratuitous because it has been so carefully thought out by Jackson.
Ramar Freeman is magnificent as Usher. The show runs at 100 minutes straight and he is on stage for the full duration, singing superbly and capturing Usher’s vulnerability as well as his joy. The actors around him, Sharlene Hector, Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea, Yeukayi Ushe, Tendai Humphrey Sitima, Danny Bailey and Eddie Elliott, are just as strong, strutting, sneering, singing, and filling Usher with self-doubt.
We cannot always see the join between Usher’s life and that of his fictional writer. Sometimes this is confusing, but it is also, clearly, part of the intended experience. Not all of the show’s references are instantly familiar to UK audiences, though: the American actor and playwright, Tyler Perry, casts a long shadow, with Usher’s parents urging him to write a good, wholesome, gospel play, just like Perry, in songs like We Wanna Know, and this might leave some UK audiences on the back foot.
It ends with a non-ending, breaking the rules of storytelling but without any sense of jarring or gimmickry. These circles within circles could just continue, we feel, after the curtain falls. A strange loop indeed.
At the Barbican theatre, London, until 9 September.
