A STATEMENT FROM MICHAEL R. JACKSON

When I imagined my musical A Strange Loop finally receiving a production, the most I ever dreamed of was a modest Off-Broadway production. Broadway was the furthest thing from my imagination. I knew what made it to Broadway and a musical about a musical about a musical just wasn’t it.

 I first worked with Page 73 in the 2017-18 season on two workshops of A Strange Loop that they produced in partnership with Barbara Whitman and Musical Theatre Factory. Through those workshops, director Stephen Brackett and I explored staging, I first began collaborating with choreographer Raja Feather Kelly, and I introduced new songs into the musical while refining its structure. This was an opportunity for me to finally see the piece away from music stands and to get a sense of its physical dimensions and heartbeat. It was the first time the piece started to feel real.

In 2017 and 2018, Page 73 also offered me opportunities to develop other pieces I was writing during two week-long writing retreats [SPACE and Pocantico] and through membership in their Interstate 73 writers group.

In 2019, Page 73 partnered with Playwrights Horizons to produce the world premiere of A Strange Loop, and I got to see the piece fully realized. Elements which I had only dreamed up began to show up on stage—costumes, scenery, and orchestrations. Raja’s movements which had seemed so confined in rehearsal rooms were suddenly bursting off the stage under Jen Schriever’s beautiful lighting design. From there to a rapturous opening and run that culminated in a glorious original Off-Broadway cast album took my humble dream of a show to dizzying heights, memorializing it for all the hear forever. And if that wasn’t enough, A Strange Loop won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2020. Every time I thought the piece couldn’t go higher, it shocked me with one more notch upwards.

 After all of that acclaim, finally seeing the piece I’d spent nearly two decades working on open on Broadway was nothing short of a miracle. It was like a self-manifestation of the piece itself. A “big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway show” leapt from the page to the stage. From Page 73 to be exact. I am so fortunate that this savvy and dedicated institution stepped in when it did. It took a village to bring A Strange Loop to realization, and Page 73’s belief in the piece over the course of many years helped manifest resources and momentum that catapulted the show into the stratosphere.  

MICHAEL R. JACKSON - Playwright, Composer, Lyricist

The 2020 Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics’ Circle–winning A Strange Loop (which had its 2019 world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions) was called “a full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul, and loins” and a “gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies” by Ben Brantley for The New York Times. In The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham wrote, “To watch this show is to enter, by some urgent, bawdy magic, an ecstatic and infinitely more colorful version of the famous surreal lithograph by M. C. Escher: the hand that lifts from the page, becoming almost real, then draws another hand, which returns the favor.” In addition to A Strange Loop, he wrote book, music, and lyrics for White Girl in Danger. Awards and associations include a New Professional Theatre Festival Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, an ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, a Whiting Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk Award, an Obie Award, an Antonyo Award, a Fred Ebb Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize, and a Dramatists Guild Fellowship. He is an alum of Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group