Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
The 75th annual Tony Awards, airing Sunday, June 12, from New York’s Radio City Music Hall and honoring Broadway’s 2021-2022 season, will feature two critically acclaimed musicals with connections to Dayton.
Youngstown native and 2012 Wright State University musical theater graduate Joey Monda of Sing Out, Louise! Productions and West Milton native Jimmy Wilson of Barbara Whitman Productions are among the legion of producers behind Michael R. Jackson’s dynamic Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “A Strange Loop.”
A bold, fierce and groundbreaking exploration of Black identity, introspection, truth-telling, spirituality, and the debatable appeal of Tyler Perry, “A Strange Loop” is the clear frontrunner with 11 nominations including Best Musical. As the title suggests, the show concerns Usher, a Black, queer writer, writing a musical about a Black, queer writer writing a musical about a Black, queer writer.
In 2019, “A Strange Loop” had its world premiere off-Broadway at New York’s Playwrights Horizons. In December 2021, it received raves during its run at Washington, D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, paving the way for its road to Broadway where it opened April 26 at the Lyceum Theatre to more glowing notices.
Charles McNulty of the Los Angeles Times notably praised Jackson’s work saying, “For much of this triumphant, emotionally lacerating show, I sat with my mouth agape, astonished and grateful that something so brutally honest and rigorously constructed had finally broken through to a Broadway stage.”
