As a child, Michael R. Jackson religiously watched soap operas with his great-aunt. “The Days of Our Lives.” “Another World.” “Santa Barbara.” “The Young and the Restless.”
He continued watching until high school. He interned at the university’s ‘All My Children’. After that, he went to New York to become a serial drama writer.
Instead, he became a playwright, where he was highly regarded. His first musical, A Strange Loop, a meta-take of a Broadway usher writing his own musical, won both awards. Pulitzer Prize for Drama It won a Tony Award for Best Musical and is currently on Broadway.
His sophomore musical will hit Off-Broadway next spring. It’s called “White Girl in Danger,” a race-conscious sen-up of the soap opera genre.
“White Girl in Danger” imagines a soap opera set in a town called All White, with a group of black performers called The Blackgrounds cast exclusively in storylines about slavery and the police. One of these performers, Keesha, tries to break that pattern by grabbing a central story her line from the three white protagonists, Megan, Megan, and Megan, but in doing so , she also risks clashing with the All-White Killer.
“A lot of the genre elements come from the world of soap operas, life movies, soap operas,” Jackson says. “The idea of the show was going to be a broad satire, but then these conversations about representation, diversity, equity and inclusivity started happening in the theater world. I started thinking about those issues. Suddenly one molecule becomes another.”
Jackson has been developing musicals since 2017, and last summer the incubator New York Stage and Film unveiled two days of concert-style readings in the Hudson Valley.
The 12-person cast musical is co-produced by two New York nonprofits, the Vineyard Theater and the Second Stage Theater, and will be staged next spring at the Tony Kiser Theater on the Second Stage. Directed by Liliana Blaine Cruz and choreographed by Rajah Feather Kelly, the show will begin previews on March 15th and is slated to open on April 10th.