Jason Veasey

The Fires

May 28, 2024

Raja Feather Kelly, an award-winning choreographer of recent Broadway musicals "A Strange Loop" and "Lempicka," as well as "Teeth," the recent Playwrights Horizons success imminently getting a commercial Off-Broadway run, makes his debut as a playwright with "The Fires," a work drenched in sorrow. The play examines three, actually four, Black men who inhabit the same third floor South Brooklyn railroad apartment in vastly different eras: 1974, 1998 and 2021. [more]

A Strange Loop

May 5, 2022

Deliriously and explicitly profane, Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize winning musical, "A Strange Loop" has—unbelievably—made it to Broadway, produced by Playwrights Horizons, Page 73 and the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. Jackson’s explicit portrait of a lost soul’s salty journey is alternately stunning and amusing, appealing and appalling, told at a breakneck pace through his book, lyrics and music. It’s a rare, if dispiriting, portrait of a gay man who isn’t a paragon, a man who isn’t conventionally handsome, successful or rich. [more]

X the Experience

March 28, 2021

The music by Manuel Pelayo, Giancarlo Bonfanti and Katz sets an eerie, futuristic tone that, combined with numerous dance and visual elements, presents X the Experience like a long MTV video with some thoughtful concepts acted out in between. X the Experience posits the interesting question as to whether human beings can ever truly give up their “personal provocative narrative” in favor of any greater good, and writer Veasey’s script successfully puts this notion forward, when the script is in progress. If you’ve got the time and especially the patience, check out X the Experience. [more]

A Strange Loop

June 19, 2019

Twenty-five-year-old African-American Michigan native and New York University graduate Usher is an usher at a Disney Broadway musical who is writing an autobiographical musical about his troubled life. His religious Christian parents are scornful of his sexuality and dubious of his career goals as he doesn’t emulate the commercial simplisticness of Tyler Perry who gets skewered in a production number. This exploration is light on plot and so we get a series a of overheated vignettes often laden with wan shock value. The often didactic dialogue relies on scatology peppered with the N-word. Dark comedy crossed with poignancy abounds. [more]