THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
No, he’s not that Michael Jackson (that show, called MJ, arrives in the West End in the spring). This is the West End premiere of the show that wowed Broadway last year, winning not just the Tony and NY Drama Critics Circle prizes for Best Musical but also the Pulitzer Prize. It has become a cultural phenomenon attracting ‘co-producers’ ranging from Steven Spielberg, the National Theatre, Jennifer Hudson, Mindy Kaling, and Alan Cumming. Does it live up to the hype? The answer is that it surpasses it.
The show is about a 25-year-old queer, black, overweight usher at The Lion King, named Usher, who is writing a musical about a 25-year-old queer, black, overweight usher at The Lion King who…you get the idea. It’s a theatrical Escher drawing.
Conceptually it’s radical for Broadway, and invigoratingly so, in that that the characters comprise just our protagonist and 6 actors who play his Thoughts 1 to 6, each of which represents a different aspect of his psyche. The 6 who emerge from their cubicles to embody his fears, and in particular his self-loathing, also play the other people in his life and interchange those roles. It all keeps the audience on its toes.
This could all be ‘too clever by half’ of course but it isn’t. Instead, it is a profoundly thoughtful and witty piece which builds to an emotional crescendo and has a refreshingly brutal honesty about sex and friendships, and race and popular culture, that we haven’t seen elsewhere in plays or musicals recently. This is theater for grown-ups, and it is incredibly explicit on matters sexual. It’s all done lightning speed however, thanks to Stephen Brackett’s nimble direction, so you haven’t time to be offended because you haven’t stopped laughing.
Musically it achieves The Second Coming, answering the question that troubles musical theater aficionados - who could be the inheritor to Sondheim’s crown? The lyrics are Sondheim sharp, and the book has a complexity and brevity that the great man would envy. The score has great variety and delivers some great belters like ‘Memory Song’ while exploiting a range of styles. Vocally this ensemble, all multi hyphenate, executes them all with finesse.
The piece never wallows in self-pity but instead confronts its audience intelligently with the whole unhappy melange of race and identity politics and what it means to be a young black overweight gay man in our crazy world. It is relentless in how it lampoons central cultural figures like Tyler Perry who trade in representations of black experience that people like Usher recoil from. The piece doesn’t pull its punches on racism and is bracing on the pretty brutal homophobia Usher encounters from his Christian family, culminating in an amazing gospel number which expands on Perry’s typical characters and tropes. Arnulfo Maldonado’s design is simplicity itself for the first half, suddenly expanding into a full set for the ‘Perry’ house. Jackson also wittily skewers rarefied Black icons from Harriet Tubman to Whitney Houston and how they play on young black people’s consciousness.
Kyle Ramar Freeman deserves every gong going as Usher. Blessed with a powerful soul voice, which he uses sparingly, he combines charm with a quiet intelligence and manages to be poignantly funny one minute and heartbreaking the next. The scenes of sexual self-abasement as he plays the field trying to find himself are bracingly honest and the encounters with the theater world by contrast have a mordant wit, an agent pushing him to write about slavery as “it’s commercial”, for example. The racism of other gay men including black gay men on the scene is also perfectly drawn but the triumph of the piece is that it never preaches, instead it enlightens.
It is packed with contemporary popular culture references but is no series of sketches. It speaks to our age but will live on, as it is universal. As for the many references, in the immortal words of Tom Stoppard “If you don’t understand them you can look them up”!
