(Thought 2), Antwayn Hopper (Thought 6) in A STRANGE LOOP. L Morgan Lee (Thought 1), Jason Veasey (Thought 5), John-Michael Lyles (Thought 3), Jaquel Spivey (Usher), John-Andrew Morrison (Thought 4), James Jackson, Jr. Jackson, a Black queer writer, telling us that he used to be an usher, adds yet another layer to this exhilaratingly meta musical. Usher’s self-referential musical is called A Strange Loop, and it’s about a Black queer writer who is writing a musical about a Black queer writer who is writing a musical. When he’s not being harassed with hundreds of questions from a swarm of theatreland tourists during the show’s intermission, Usher’s thoughts turn to the musical he’s writing, which he declares will be “a big Black and queer-ass American Broadway show”. A couple of minutes later in the show’s electrifying, urgent and funny opening number, Intermission Song, we meet a plus size Black queer theatre usher named Usher (Jaquel Spivey making a dazzling Broadway debut), working on Broadway at the The Lion King. Theatre etiquette which he says, as a former usher, he finds particularly irksome when ignored. Jackson-politely reminds us to keep our masks on and to switch off or silence our mobile devices. In the meantime, School Pictures offers a highly valuable snapshot of life on the front lines of modern education.Before the lights go down at the Lyceum Theatre, a recorded announcement by A Strange Loop’s Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, composer and lyricist-Michael R. I look forward to the work they will devise as their career matures. It’s particularly delightful to watch how the various instruments that Cramer plays throughout the course of the performance-ukulele, toy piano, keyboard-materialize onto the stage.Ĭurrently a graduate student in playwriting at the University of California, San Diego, Cramer has already found a thoughtful way to balance narrative theater and performance art here. Jean Kim’s expansive, whimsical set design resembles a classroom as refracted through a funhouse mirror. Morgan Green, the Wilma’s lead artistic director this season, allows the material to unfold with enough variation that the staging never feels repetitious, even as Cramer occasionally repeats gestures and blocking. But it’s also a testament to the importance of the show’s central message. That’s due, at least in part, to goodwill-Cramer has become such an appealing figure over the preceding hour that you can’t help following them into the weeds. I won’t reveal what Cramer has to say about the matter, but admirably and refreshingly, they keep this pivot from feeling didactic even as they hammer home the wonkiest of policy details. The intimate portraiture of School Pictures builds to a pointed treatise on the modern public education system, which throws the personal troubles faced by contemporary scholars into stark relief. Cramer-whose biographical note in the program mentions a childhood marked by speech therapy-is uncommonly sensitive to the struggles of students with deficits in learning acquisition. Although it’s only mentioned explicitly near the end of the show, the vagaries of the pandemic are present throughout, as students and teachers were forced to deal with the ramifications of learning interruptions and Zoom instruction. A surprising number of Cramer’s pupils want to be artists when they grow up, which fascinates the struggling playwright-slash-barista.Ĭramer shows how the obstacles encountered by students don’t exist in a vacuum. Although each student is filtered through the creator’s lens, we begin to pick up on personality traits and differences of experience and background, as Cramer sings about extracurricular activities and career goals. Over the course of an hour, Cramer portrays nine students with admirable individuation. Part lecture and part song cycle, they disarm the audience with humor in order to ask pointed questions about the state of our schools. Cramer takes the audience on an endearing and quietly moving journey through the rigors and inequities experienced by New York City high school students.
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