A Strange Loop is a metafictional musical with book, music and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson, following Usher, a Black, queer Broadway usher writing a musical about a Black, queer Broadway usher writing a musical. It premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama before ever reaching Broadway, and transferred to the Lyceum Theatre in 2022, where it won the Tony Award for Best Musical.
What is danced
The article does not describe choreography, steps or movement vocabulary for any scene or number. Raja Feather Kelly is named as choreographer for the off-Broadway production and is recorded as returning for the Broadway and London mountings, but the source gives no account of what he staged. The only physical detail offered is a review characterisation of the off-Broadway cast's performances as 'physically exhaustive' — evidence that the show is demanding on the body, but not evidence of any specific technique or style. Numbers such as 'Writing a Gospel Play' (Usher 'acting out all the characters as caricatures') imply heightened, theatrical impersonation rather than dance per se, and the synopsis otherwise reads as book-scene-and-song rather than danced sequence.
Context
The show arrived in a period when off-Broadway venues like Playwrights Horizons were incubating formally experimental, identity-centred musicals, and A Strange Loop's Pulitzer win in 2020 — awarded before any Broadway production existed — was itself unusual and widely noted. Its 2022 Broadway transfer, delayed by the pandemic, made it the first musical written by a Black person to win the Pulitzer for Drama and the first Pulitzer-winning musical to reach Broadway only after the prize. The article frames its critical reception around its 'emotional honesty and meta themes' rather than its dance, consistent with its identity as a book-and-song-driven piece rather than a dance vehicle.
Staging history
After previews from May 24, 2019, the show opened off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on June 17, 1999 [see note] with Larry Owens as Usher, under director Stephen Brackett and choreographer Raja Feather Kelly. A Washington, D.C. run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, originally set for September 2020, was postponed to December 2021 because of the pandemic. The Broadway production opened at the Lyceum Theatre on April 26, 2022, closing January 15, 2023, and the same core creative team (Brackett, Kelly, orchestrator Charlie Rosen, music director Rona Siddiqui) carried through to a London production at the Barbican Centre in 2023 and a joint American Conservatory Theater/Center Theatre Group production in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2024. A Richmond, Virginia production in 2025, directed by Katrinah Carol Lewis with an entirely different cast and crew, is also recorded.
How to watch it
Watch for the device that structures the whole piece: Usher's inner critics appear onstage as embodied 'Thoughts,' who double as other characters (his parents, dating-app matches, historical Black figures) and break the fourth wall to argue with him directly. The show's demands are described by critics as physically exhausting for the ensemble, though the specific vocabulary used to realize that is not documented in this source.