Growing up, Michael R. Jackson wanted to write soap operas. He did something much better than that. He wrote a strange musical—songs, lyrics, and book—called A Strange Loop. This meta-musical won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and and two big Tonys in June 2022. Now Jackson is back with a second musical, White Girl in Danger. And this one does pull from his old interest, taking inspiration from TV melodramas such as Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless, and All My Children. Set in a town called Allwhite, the show uses soap-opera tropes to explore race. Black people—Blackgrounds—are only featured in subplots about slavery and policing. Fed up, Keesha, a Blackground, attempts to take a storyline from three white protagonists. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs the Off-Broadway debut. —Jensen Davis