Review Roundup: Michael R. Jackson's WHITE GIRL IN DANGER Opens Off-Broadway

Jesse Green, The New York Times: It was in any case an opportunity worth taking. A glance at some of the "special thanks" in small type in the program gives you a sense of the fascinating breadth of Jackson's high-low influences: Jackie Collins, Black musicals, "Fine-Ass Oiled Up Mens," Soap Opera Digest, "PC/un-PC/woke/anti-woke" story lines, cultural neoliberalism and childhood loneliness. You can pretty much feel them all in "White Girl," especially when a figure whose identity I won't spoil (but is played beautifully by James Jackson Jr., one of the "thoughts" in "A Strange Loop") arrives near the end as a kind of deus ex mess to untangle the show's themes. Though that proves impossible, his attempt reminds us that ambivalence of all kinds, about people and love and stories and theater, is not a failure no matter what world you live in. Nor is it a success. It's a start.

Jackson McHenry, Vulture: Like many soaps, it's also a hot mess, though an ambitious and fascinating one. The musical is overlong and its pacing is disjointed, lingering too long in some situations and then suddenly leaping into others, often hand waving away logic and character motivation. Director Lileana Blain-Cruz has taken Jackson's already maximal script and gone even bigger: the set's painted in garish acid and pink hues, the blaring sound design obscures a majority of the lyrics, and the performances are dialed up the realm of that Saved by the Bell episode about caffeine pills. White Girl in Danger both wants to offer up a soap opera thrill ride and dismantle the ride as it's running. By the end of the show, it has twisted around and smashed into itself.

Charles Isherwood, The Wall Street Journal: It's not just the white girls who are in trouble at "White Girl in Danger," the new musical from Michael R. Jackson, who won the Pulitzer Prize and the Best Musical Tony for "A Strange Loop." The audience is imperiled, or at least likely to be seriously baffled, by this confused and confusing spoof of soap operas of yesteryear, but also slasher movies of early-"Scream" vintage, all loosely wrapped in a woozy and wordy critique of America's racist culture and history.

David Finkle, New York Stage Review: At the end of the Allwhite/Blackgrounds day, Jackson's soap opera conceit achieves little that he means to impart about Black lives needing to matter firstly to Blacks themselves. He's all but conceding as much with the insertion of Clarence's explication. Worse, it may even be that Nell's advice to Keesha about crashing white society could be interpreted as Jackson advising Blacks to stay in their place. Unquestionably, that's not what he wants to suggest, but there it is. White Girl in Danger is not entirely a shambles or a sham, but it is a shame. It might even lead to some Jackson admirers wondering if they've overrated A Strange Loop. They absolutely have not. All the same, any disappointment they may currently experience is understandable.