Pandemic delays another production
Award winner’s journey to NYC now on hold
A Strange Loop, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical that was to begin its journey to Broadway at Washington, D.C.’S Woolly Mammoth Theatre in September, has been postponed, the company has announced.
The D.C. engagement is now slated for summer 2021 as its next step.
Like so many projects in the planning stages, the play is caught in the logistical nightmare of COVID-19 curtailments.
“All theatres are having to learn what it means to open in phases, to protect our audiences and our artists,” said Maria Goyanes, Woolly’s artistic director.
“So we are going to be moving A Strange Loop to now end (the season). The hope is that we would be able to start performances early next summer.”
Michael R. Jackson’s musical, an autobiographical carousel of sorts, set in the over-caffeinated mind of a conflicted black gay playwright, has had its fortunes boosted by the Pulitzer it garnered May 4. So Jackson, Goyanes and Barbara Whitman — a New York producer attached to the show since its development period — were especially keen on establishing a realistic new timetable.
“I think we just didn’t know what was going to happen, with the daily saga of this virus,” said the Detroit-born Jackson. “Also, the thing I had been thinking about is people’s state of mind: When would people want to sit together and watch a show and have that communal experience again? It’s such a psychically traumatic thing. It’s going to take a while for people to relax with each other.”
Of the 10 musicals awarded the Pulitzer over the past century — among them, South Pacific, A Chorus Line, Rent and Hamilton — A Strange Loop is the first to win without having been staged on Broadway. It debuted in a well-received production last summer at off-broadway’s Playwrights Horizons.
“It’s meaningful to me in the sense that perhaps the culture will listen to other people of colour — and in my case, black voices in particular,” said Jackson, 39, a graduate of New York University’s musical theatre program. “My career in musical theatre was not a predestined one, but also once I decided that was what I wanted to do, I didn’t give myself a Plan B.
Whitman, who was a producer on Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s Fun Home, a musical with off-broadway roots that went on to Broadway and Tony-winning success, wants to take A Strange Loop to Broadway sometime after the Woolly Mammoth production.
It will retain Brackett as director. Casting is still to be determined, although Jackson says he is devoted to the Playwrights Horizons ensemble.
An intimate, unconventional musical, A Strange Loop probably doesn’t have a huge upside for the tourist market, which — before the pandemic — was Broadway’s mainstay.
There is great uncertainty about what the constellation of shows will look like whenever Broadway does reopen. But if a resurgent Times Square becomes more dependent on New York audiences who gravitate toward more sophisticated fare, A Strange Loop may be well positioned.