“A Strange Loop,” which is being marketed as a “big, Black, queer-ass American musical,” is in part about how identity is cobbled together out of the flotsam of pop culture: how the faces we present to the world are neither organic nor stolen, but co-opted, borrowed and reshaped in the borrowing.
And I think that maybe it’s given me a certain kind of confidence, perhaps, as somebody in the entertainment world because ‘Michael Jackson’ stands for pop excellence and razzmatazz and razzle-dazzle, and that’s certainly something that I aspire to in my own work.” There’s a certain excitement that comes up, and maybe I’ve been able to utilize that. “And yet, there’s something about his legacy that is invoked whenever my name comes up. But we’re two very different artists working in two very different traditions.” He paused, punctuating his thinking with ellipsis, his voice relaxed and slowly propulsive, as if his sentences were bridges he was building as he walked over them. “Certainly whenever my name is mentioned, the ghost of him appears somewhere. Jackson has embraced the absurdity of the coincidence - his website name and Instagram handle is “thelivingmichaeljackson,” for example. That’s been both an annoyance and a help.” “When I say that, I mean that, my whole identity as a person just in the world, has always been sort of tied to that man, because of our names. “See what I did there?” He stopped, started again, wanting to clarify. He chuckled, his buoyant, lisp-tinged laughter calling to mind fluttering shirttails. “It’s a strange loop,” Jackson told me on the phone when I mentioned the coincidence. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning metafictional musical, which premiered on Broadway in April. This image advertised “A Strange Loop,” the playwright Michael R.
Seven blocks away, at the Lyceum Theater on 45th Street, another sign bore the name “Michael Jackson” and an illustration of a 20-something Black man’s head in semi-profile, with six tiny bodies floating around his face and hair. On 52nd Street, at the Neil Simon Theater, where “MJ: The Musical” has been running since December, there’s a graphic of the King of Pop in his iconic early ’90s pose: fedora perched low, obscuring his face shirttails flying in the artificial wind white glove high-water pants sparkling socks feet en pointe. ĭuring a walk along the Great White Way this winter, I saw something peculiar: two marquees advertising two Michael Jacksons.
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