"Whether you are delighted, appalled or annoyed by the resulting production — and the odds are you will experience all of these responses — you can’t deny that it is uncompromisingly, exactly what it claims to be. Directed with admirable clarity by Brackett, with fabulously inventive choreography by Raja Feather Kelly, 'A Strange Loop' is a self-portrait in an endless hall of mirrors that dares to forbid closure, escape or redemption to the artistically thwarted being at its center."
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"The first 20 minutes are an exhilarating cocktail of hilarious lyrical complexity and Owens’s Idina Menzel belt; even after the rage begins to mount, Jackson—abetted by a bravura ensemble and Brackett’s super direction—keeps extending what we can take with explosively funny asides. But 'A Strange Loop,' for all its mayhem, is basically a Passion play...Owens and Jackson take our hands and press them deep into the wound that the world has made: It stains us, but it stanches the blood."
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"Jackson’s triumph with 'A Strange Loop' is that by diving into the excruciatingly personal, he finds the broadly human...If 'A Strange Loop' sometimes feels like an early play — like a writer trying to muscle through the 20s-dominating obsession with self so that he can break out and into the rest of the world and the rest of his work and life — it’s also rich with clever comedy and eviscerating honesty."
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"Sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exasperating...The loops and hoops that Usher has to go through in the show’s final quarter become entangled with careening themes and repetition...Still, both Usher’s journey and Jackson’s show offer bracing insights into the endless strata of conflicts faced by those who are young, gifted and black — and so much more."
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"This show can’t decide whether to lead a revolution, sell out, or curl up in a ball hurling insults at a mirror. That’s the subversive, polymorphous genius of it...The seven-member cast is nothing short of heroic...Director Stephen Brackett brings it together with style and verve, immensely aided by Raja Feather Kelly’s seemingly bottomless bag of choreographic tricks."
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"We get 100 uninterrupted minutes of the rawest, funniest, most uncomfortably honest musical you're likely to see all year...In Usher, Jackson has created a character that doesn't fit neatly into any tribe, which makes him that much more potent as a dramatic force...The result is a show that uses the language of musical theater to express ideas that have never been uttered in a musical."
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"'A Strange Loop' takes a highly unpromising premise and spins it into something startlingly, brutally honest...I cannot think of any other play that has so uncompromisingly confronted the institutional homophobia found in many black churches; this alone makes 'A Strange Loop' one for the books...'A Strange Loop' is a cry from the heart, but not so raw that one wants to turn away. This is due no doubt in part to Stephen Brackett's crisp, fast-moving direction."
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"But for a good stretch, Jackson keeps us engaged....Jackson's melodies fall easily on the ear, when they don't repeat themselves too much, and his lyrics are rather better than his music, when they don't repeat themselves too much...Jackson, in short, is lucky. Which isn't to say he lacks talent. 'A Strange Loop' shows promise, and one hopes that, having gotten this musical session on the couch out of his system, he'll next tackle something more far-reaching."
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