One thing that never gets old is witnessing “the follow-up.” No matter the field, the follow-up is the work an artist makes directly after their most acclaimed work. Whether it be a byproduct of gargantuan sales or endless accolades, there is a barrier that is often difficult to overcome. For example, how does Lin Manuel Miranda follow up Hamilton? On Broadway, it was Freestyle Love Supreme. Many see the follow-up as the blank check meant to allow an artist to indulge in their most desirous project that has been sitting on the back burner ever since they started producing work. Some excel while others fail. No matter what, the follow-up says more about the artist often than the story they’re wishing to tell.
Few modern artists have intrigued me in the follow-up department quite like Michael R. Jackson. Back in 2021, I put on the Broadway recording of A Strange Loop and found myself in awe of what I was hearing. Sure, part of it was a drought of quality musicals during the quarantine era. However, it was also because of how visceral and alive it was, capturing the story of a writer struggling with intersectionality in ways that could at best be called uncompromising and resulting in ways that shocked and appalled. In one of my favorite moments, Jackson reflects the loss of identity in protagonist Usher by having him sing “writing a gospel play!” to a melody that feels lifted from Sousa.
He went on to win the Tony for, among other things, Best Musical. There’s no more envious honor for theater types. It will live in the pantheon next to greats like South Pacific or Sweeney Todd. With a lot of big name producers, it was a moment to elevate Jackson into a rarified company and see what he would do next. For a while, I thought it would be Teeth, a musical based on the movie Teeth (2007) about, ahem, a killer vagina. Immediately I knew that he was going to embrace camp and give us something so wild and ridiculous that it’s more approaching a good time.
I still am looking forward to hearing the Off-Broadway album for Teeth. However, that’s not the follow-up to A Strange Loop. One night on Instagram, I found Jackson posting a link to a recently released work called White Girl in Danger: a title that escaped my awareness up to that point but nonetheless piqued my interest. On the record company’s website, Jackson wrote a heartfelt letter about the creation of the show, detailing how he would watch 80s soap operas with his great aunt as a child. Something about the premise interested him and he aspired to make a show at any cost. From his personal analysis of its success, it’s not likely to be Broadway bound. It may not even have a second act. This album is its lasting legacy that it even at all existed.
As a fan of offbeat works, I set aside the hour necessary to give it a proper listen. Even if it never reaches the heights of A Strange Loop for me, it cements my belief that Michael R. Jackson – for better or worse – is an artist that I want to follow. Whenever he comes out with a show, I will be there at very least hearing him out. Give me a song (or even theater tickets) and I will be ready to hear someone who is indebted to theater but not in the conventional sense. His work feels so deeply personal to a fault that A Strange Loop and White Girl in Danger almost feel like b-sides of each other from a framework perspective. Jackson comes from the metatextual approach to storytelling that’s becoming increasingly popular over the past decade. Without seeing this show’s use of it, I can only say that it’s interesting but also felt abrupt. But hey, it got Cord Jefferson an Oscar.
With that said, I found myself able to appreciate the greater nuances pushing through on later listens. Even if I don’t know how the penultimate track “Centering Myself” fits the story, it doesn’t entirely reject itself from the text. If anything, it proves how eager Jackson is to explore ideas around identity. Given that his previous show featured songs like “Inner White Girl,” it makes sense that he has some complicated feelings about white images being projected to Black audiences. If anything, I feel like White Girl in Danger does a greater job of exploring on a painfully personal level how it’s impacted him. I should say that it helps to read the aforementioned essay to fully appreciate this narrative, but otherwise I think he still has made one of my favorite musical albums of the year.
To break into the story, White Girl in Danger is a trashy, campy musical take on soap operas through the lens of racial tensions and murder mysteries. Certain plot points are more obvious than others. For example, the story takes place in a city called Allwhite and “The Allwhite Girls” all share variations of the name Meghan while introducing them in a harmonized Valley girl accent singing, “We’re so basic.” For those worrying that White Girl in Danger is keen on subtlety, walk out now. Meanwhile, the protagonist is a woman who wants to do something meaningful for black/brown stories while being told by her self-professed mammy mother figure that it would be dangerous. Jackson wants to challenge expectations. He wants to address history.
He also wants to do that through the lens of the most wondrously sleazy score you’re likely to hear in 2024. This is a soap opera after all and given that it’s set in the 80s, expect every song to be some takeoff of dance and new wave motifs that were popular at the time. Even if some slang feels more lifted from the past five years, the majority of the story exists within this artificial lens that at least starts in a tropey manner. The girls have lost someone right before a Battle of the Bands competition and needs someone to play autoharp. To continue the motif of white people all being the same, they give consideration to Matthew Scott and Scott Matthew… who are not the same person.
If you’re on board with this logic, feel free to stick around. Admittedly, it’s hard to know how academic the actual text is from here as Jackson felt more keen to write songs about character development and the increasingly profane actions of its cast. At one point a serial killer sings, “I jack off to your sadness” in a number aptly titled, “I Know Which Way My Semen Will Flow.” It’s a song entrenched in hormonal behavior. Characters are sexually attracted to psychopaths and in “Let’s Party” sing in a blasé tone about getting syphilis and doing drugs. These are your quintessential dumb teens. They’re so reckless that you’re surprised they didn’t die by their own hand. And, in keeping with the queer themes of A Strange Loop, Jackson gives time for a number called “Lesbian Lesbian Sex Sex Sex” which, again unsubtly, discusses how a character used hateful behavior to hide her feelings for someone else.
I can understand if the raunchy tone is not for you. There is an endless array of poor taste jokes that only work because of how wonderfully Jackson manages tone. Because this is a cruel, backwards world about shallow people, he’s able to get away with punchlines about rape, eating disorders, misogyny, and racism. Everything fits within his larger thesis of the piece. It’s a commentary on how harmful messaging can shape people. I imagine a lot of it comes from Jackson’s time watching those soap operas and being convinced that this behavior was acceptable. He didn’t see what was so offensive about it. From what I gather, it also explains his complicated interracial feelings around being Black but consuming white media. How does one form a healthy identity when you’re told your stories don’t matter?
This is a confrontational production that scratches a raw nerve. While it encourages deeper thought, it’s not exactly hiding a lot of its bigger points. Given how many songs are used to play on the Allwhite city name, it’s clear that Jackson is commenting on a divide that is personal to him. It’s the feeling of being an outsider in a community that is so ridiculously insulated that it can’t help but seem like a club worth joining. We are left to wonder what’s so appealing about white people who have this uniformity that is “basic.” They lack an introspection, whether intentionally or not, that the other characters have. They know what it feels like to fight for attention. Their daily lives are struggles. Why can’t they celebrate awful behavior without being brought into question?
That may be why the final lines of the show aren’t a grand summary of the plot. It’s a story that intentionally goes off the rails and provides an unwieldy cliffhanger for the listener. Instead, Jackson does what he did with A Strange Loop in a more direct manner. After talking about the complexity of Black culture discourse on “Centering Myself,” the show shifts to “Black Woman in the Driver’s Seat” and discusses why Black authors can’t have their own agency. More importantly, why can’t they have nuance and discuss themes like joy? It’s a great message to be left with and gives me hope that the larger show emphasizes Jackson’s point clearly. If not, it’s still this trashy soap opera with enough infectious hooks and hilarious lines to make me press replay. It works both as satire and its own glorious, messy homage.
On the one hand, I’m curious to see if Jackson can continue the metatextual trend with Teeth. There are ways to discuss feminine struggles through a horror comedy. There’s been a lot in Jackson’s work that intrigues me about how he sees the world, and I think part of it is the relationship between femininity in a hyper-masculine world. It’s another group whose stories are often repressed, forced to compete in ways that men’s aren’t. With that all said, I like to think it’s going to take on features of the soap opera side of things and is just going to be an unhinged show about a killer vagina. Will that win The Tony one day? I sure hope so.
There are definitely more polished auteurs in modern Broadway that will be making the rounds in the years ahead. I’m sure I’ll love them and not feel as dirty about their intentions. However, I love having someone like Jackson out there creating art that is absurd and personal, capturing something profound in the dumbest ways possible. Part of me worries that A Strange Loop is a fluke and we’ll never see him on Broadway again. Looking at Spotify’s listener numbers, it has 10x less than the previous Best Musical winner Moulin Rouge. It’s a show that feels enhanced because of the win, but I wonder if it’ll have the legs of modern heavyweights like Hadestown that have not only won over audiences, but it’s the rare show to be making the second stop at random cities less than two years later. In all sincerity, I don’t think A Strange Loop is doing that.
With all that said, I hope Jackson isn’t discouraged from making art that speaks to him. It may not be for everyone, but I think the best of art can be messy and uncompromising. Who knows if this is just an experimental period before Jackson lands on the next big thing. However, I’ll be happy to see the trial and error because nobody is doing it like him. He leaves you with a better sense of what matters to him as an artist, and I feel that’s more important. As art becomes more indebted to adaptation, having something like White Girl in Danger push boundaries gives me hope. Even if he’s in conversation with the past, he’s doing so in a way that is fresh and new. With all that said, I’m beyond curious to see how this all works in relation to a killer vagina.
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