By Zach Stafford
In 2019, I was living in New York City, and one day my phone rang. It was a call from a dear friend and collaborator, songwriter Benj Pasek, who could not stop gushing over a show he’d just seen Off-Broadway called A Strange Loop.
Soon after this call, the show would win a Pulitzer and become a darling within the New York theatre scene as people began to see more and more how brilliant Michael R. Jackson was and continues to be. And Benj, a friend of Michael’s already, was making sure everyone in town–even outside the theatre world–knew how amazing it was.
With every call he made, he was not just able to talk a lot of us into seeing the show who may have missed it otherwise. And eventually many of us finally got to meet producer Barbara Whitman who was then able to create an incredible tapestry of people to join her in bringing this show to life on Broadway. People including luminaries like Jennifer Hudson, RuPaul, Billy Porter (and many others) who all stood up as co-producers during a global pandemic to make sure the world got to see how incredible A Strange Loop is on Broadway.
If you’re reading this right now, it means you are probably seated for a production of the show as it continues to live a life way past the streets of New York City–and even London–here in California. And how it got here to you is through very similar efforts of community, friendship, and people stepping up for Broadway to make sure art like this can be seen by as many people as possible.
The incredible communities that make up both the American Conservatory Theater of San Francisco and Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, came together and worked tirelessly to find a path for this show to make its West Coast premiere. Through their partnership, this show was able to dream a California dream with the original creative team coming in to help shape it with a brand-new cast plus our original Thought 4 (Tony nominee John-Andrew Morrison) returning.
In the midst of all these heroic efforts, our friends at Gilead–who had always been so supportive of the show since Broadway–raised their hands to do something many companies would never do: sponsor a piece of theatre. But they didn’t stop there and neither did our two theatres presenting this amazing show for you now.
As A Strange Loop makes its California debut, A.C.T. and CTG will be doing deep community engagement work–thanks to our producing partner, Gilead–to ensure communities that are rarely seen in theatre are not only welcomed to these performances, but celebrated while they are here. This will be done through amazing nights like a Black Out Night and Pride celebrations.
They have also chosen community partners who do the real work every day in many communities to make sure they have tickets to join our ever growing Strange family–among many other initiatives all in the hopes that people are as changed by this piece as many of us were back in NYC a few years ago. All of this–everything from the initiatives to just the act of presenting this performance you’re about to witness–are being done as ways to build bridges for us all to come together. And it couldn’t happen at a better time.
We are all currently living in a country where LGBTQ+ folks, people of color, and those that live on the intersections of these two identities face so many hurdles in front of us. And a lot of the vitriol or hate we face across this country begins with people not truly knowing our stories, which is what makes A Strange Loop so important today–even every day.
Because, at the end of the day, the act of bringing people together from all walks of life to witness a story is still radical and art can still touch each and everyone of us if we let it. It is why all of us involved in theatre making keep getting up every single day and fighting to keep doing it over and over again–like our own beautiful and strange…loop.
And it is through this act of you sitting here in this theatre that we can all begin to peer through a window into someone else’s life, someone else’s story, and realize the world is big enough for all of us.
Zach Stafford is a journalist, editor, and a Tony Award-winning producer. He is the co-host of the SiriusXM podcast Vibe Check, which The New York Times named one of the best podcasts of 2022. Prior, he was the first Black editor-in-chief of The Advocate, served as the chief content officer of Grindr, and was a journalist at The Guardian. Zach is also the author of two books titled Boys and When Dogs Heal. In 2019, he was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and named as one of the most influential Black people living today by The Root.