“I told the room that day that it was really amazing that this thing I wrote alone in a room up the stairs of this little old lady in a bungalow house in the middle of nowhere in Jamaica, Queens-that I wrote this monologue as a little life raft for myself on my little Compaq Presario laptop-somehow, over the years, blossomed into this mighty ship that landed on Broadway.” “It was a really exciting and emotional day,” Jackson, 41, recalled from the Washington Heights apartment he’s lived in for 15 years. That Wednesday before opening, Jackson was thinking back to the beginning of rehearsals. Sales have been strong, and last night’s Tony wins-for Jackson as the show’s book writer, and A Strange Loop as best musical-are sure to bolster the show’s fortunes. It opened just two weeks later, on April 26, becoming a bona fide critical smash, with Jackson being celebrated for the musical’s craftsmanship, fearlessness, and unbridled humanity. Originally scheduled to start previews on April 6, the production launched instead on April 12, just in time for the show’s understudies to spring into action and for Jackson to make revisions. That meant less time for Jackson to finesse scenes and songs, causing a burst of small panic behind the scenes. His idiosyncratic, existential, metafictional musical A Strange Loop was days away from opening, after the creative team had been forced to cancel a first preview performance when COVID-19 cases were discovered within the company. On a cloudy Wednesday morning, less than a week before he was to make his overdue, pandemic-postponed Broadway debut, musical theatre writer Michael R.