Queering the Musical Theater Tradition: Narrative Metareferentiality in Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop

Musical theater’s musical suspensions (lyric time) of spoken dialogue (book time) are often associated with excess and campiness, popularizing a (stereotypical) assumption that the genre attracts predominantly a gay audience. Following the transition from the integration to the post-integration model of musical theater analysis, queer readings of the genre often understand lyric time solely as performative breaches of narrative plot development. Such approaches to experimental art works are, according to Tyler Bradway, dominant in queer literary studies and rely on a one-sided belief that narrative represents a heteronormative teleology. Moreover, existing queer readings of musical theater do not consider the genre’s racial politics of representation because “queer” is primarily defined in terms of gender and sexual orientation. Following Bradway’s queer narrative theory, I apply a formalist reading to Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop (first performed in 2019) to consider how metareferential narrativity can assist in queering the musical theater tradition, and by extension, may comment on the genre’s representational politics with regard to Black queerness. By reading lyric time as gradable implicit or explicit mise en abymes in Jackson’s musical instead of performative breaks only, narrative is not considered as essentially heteronormative or queer. Rather, I hypothesize that dramaturgical effects of narrative forms communicate ideological messages. In the case of A Strange Loop, metareferential usages of narrative forms dramatize racial doubling, which, in the case of Black queer bodies, reduce their multifaceted identity to race alone. Moreover, Jackson’s musical does not grant its protagonist, and hence the audience, dramatic closure. To deny a clear answer as to how to change social reality, I argue, is to queer narrative’s potentially realist, teleological and heteronormative message in favor of hyperbolic, open-ended excess.