Following eleven nominations at the 2022 Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical with music, lyrics and book by Michael R. Jackson has transferred to London. It’s the original production directed by Stephen Brackett, starring Kyle Lamar Freeman from the original Broadway cast, who plays a struggling New York musical theatre writer and part-time theatre usher, called ‘Usher’. For a show so explicitly set in New York, the London audience response throughout is electric, with an immediate, screaming standing ovation you are unlikely to find anywhere else.

The opening number calls for a “big, black, and queer-ass American Broadway”, to big audience cheers, but this is something we never get to see in this one-act musical. All roles apart from Usher are played by Usher’s six ‘thoughts’ (Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea, Danny Bailey, Eddie Elliott, Sharlene Hector, Tendai Humphrey Sitima, Yeukayi Ushe): all young, hot dancers, clad in pastel pink leisurewear and crop tops, constantly reminding him of how undesirable Usher is for being fat, black, ugly, and effeminate; and thus how unsellable this is for a musical.

Usher repeatedly tries and fails to overcome the onslaught of negativity from every corner of New York society and his family; culminating in an endless Gospel sequence to the refrain, “AIDS is God’s Punishment”. When Usher finally finds someone willing to have sex with him, it’s a weird, older white man who degrades him with racial slurs, using him because he’s as miserable and self-hating as Usher is.

The self-referential and self-indulgent trope of the show’s own writer struggling to write the very show he’s in has been managed better elsewhere, like [title of show] (2006). You won’t find a big, black and queer-ass American Broadway here, but maybe this is one step along the way, and maybe that’s something worth screaming about.

Playing at the Barbican Theatre 17 June — 9 Sep 2023.