The only way to do it is to do it

Musical theater's Michael R. Jackson will be the keynote guest artist at Harvard's CompFest on April 12. 

By Vicki Xu '23
OFA Staff Blogger

Michael R. Jackson is a playwright, composer and lyricist whose musical A Strange Loop won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for drama , the 2022 Tony Award for Best Musical and many other theatrical awards. It was first produced off-Broadway in 2019 and then on Broadway in 2022. The story follows Usher, a Black queer man writing a musical about a Black queer man, as he tries to find his footing personally and professionally.

On April 12, Jackson will be the keynote speaker for CompFest 2023 (April 10-15), produced by the Office for the Arts with founder and artistic director Veronica Leahy '23. This isn’t Jackson’s first event with the OFA; in spring 2021, he was a guest artist in conversation virtually with Harvard Black CAST. In anticipation of his visit this time, I sat down with Jackson over Zoom to learn about his process, influence and the advice he has to offer to aspiring artists. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get started as a composer, and how did your college years shape you as an artist?
Technically, I got started as a composer just growing up playing piano in church. I didn’t think of myself as a composer at that time, but I did quite a lot of improvisation, and that really influenced my compositional style that I would come to later when I was in grad school. My undergrad years didn’t shape me much as a composer because I was studying playwriting at the time, but it did influence it in the sense that I was learning about storytelling. In my craft class my first year, my teacher taught us that a story was a character who wants something and is presented with obstacles, and they either fail, achieve or abandon their story purpose. Thinking of a story in those terms really helped me begin to understand that stories have beginnings, middles and ends. You have to start in one place and end in another, or you start in one place and end in the same place but there’s some change that has to happen. The structure is up to you as the artist to figure out. I couldn’t have really put that to use as a songwriter unless I understood storytelling as a whole.

How do your lived experiences influence the themes of your work, in particular with A Strange Loop? 
A Strange Loop really began quite organically because it started as a monologue I started writing right after I graduated undergrad. It just was a process of discovery. It wasn’t initially going to be a musical at all – it was a thinly veiled personal testimony of what it felt like to be a young Black gay man at the time, living in a world of great uncertainty. Then when I went to grad school and began writing music, the songs that I was writing were thinly veiled personal testimonies, so there was an overlap between monologue and the songs. When I put the music to the monologue, it just began to turn into something. It felt like it had a bigger arc to it. I just had to follow that arc over many years and collaborations in order to find the story, the characters and things inside of it.

What about artistic influences?
The artistic influences were many. The musical Company and A Chorus Line were two big bedrocks for me. They both were what were called “concept musicals”. That’s sort of what I imagined A Strange Loop would be because it wasn’t a typical musical. The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin and Passing Strange were also deeply inspirational to me because they were black songwriters and storytellers telling their personal stories in musical theater form.

At Harvard, many students have ventured beyond the canon either with original works or casting. Would you say musical theater at large has begun seeing more diverse voices and creations, and if so, where do you think the shift has come from?
You could say we’re seeing more works from non-white writers in terms of just volume compared to previous years. What that means remains to be seen.

What do you do to get into the artmaking headspace? 
For songwriting, I do a lot of noodling, just sort of playing around. A lot of times ideas will spring out of that play-around. But there’s no rhyme or reason to it. In general, I have to be quiet and listen to what’s in the universe. When I let myself listen, I’ll hear things that are sort of intangible if I’m trying to force it. When I get very busy, it’s often hard to do that. It’s the moment when I’m not in process that I can finally start to sit and listen, or go for a walk, or something like that, and ideas will come out.

Anything you want to say to aspiring composers and music directors at Harvard looking to get involved with professional music-making, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds?
The only way to do it is to do it, and to not go into it with an attitude that because you’re from an underrepresented group that somehow you don’t belong there or that there’s some impenetrable barrier. You have to get as good as you can at your craft, and you have to meet people and establish relationships that can help you break into the business the way you would like to. It’s not going to be easy, but the more you hone your craft, and the more you relate to people as somebody folks want to work with, the better you will be off.

Find out more about the entire lineup for CompFest 2023 events here. Read Vicki Xu's additional coverage about the organizers and performers for CompFest. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.