Can you pull back a little?…you gotta take your cues off of me.
But, Keith, you keep stepping all over my vocals. In the soft, fey speaking voice we all know, Jackson keeps everyone in line with his vision: “Thank you, beautiful work,” he all but whispers after the final notes of the first song. No sooner has the song ended than MJ establishes its central theme: Jackson as a quiet but firm taskmaster, as exacting in his own quest for perfection as his abusive father had been. Mingling and genial chatter gives way to the shapes, forms and sounds that we recognize from the very first note: “Beat It.”
A buzz of excitement builds with every announcement that the star is five minutes away, then three, then…By the time Jackson – immediately knowable with his slight frame and hunched posture, his loose-fitting clothes, his presence – quietly ambles in, the rehearsal space – and the Neil Simon Theatre stage – is primed for action. Ten minutes before “curtain,” an assemblage of dancers, back-up singers, security staff and recording technicians begin to populate what we quickly recognize as a rehearsal studio. It succeeds: MJ is a wildly entertaining marvel. Aside from the pedestrian framing device, MJ pushes hard and unceasingly to move beyond the just-good-enough nostalgia that can turn even second-rate jukebox productions into crowd pleasers. Watching MJ, one easily suspects its top-flight creative team was motivated by the same near-maniacal drive. As Jackson says so often if becomes a mantra, the Dangerous show must be perfect. The Dangerous tour and album will either return Jackson to the cultural pinnacle or simply return him to the earthly realm inhabited by the Madonnas and Bowies and Springsteens of the world. We’re told (if we need reminding) that the stakes for Jackson couldn’t be higher: Nine years after his enormously successful, groundbreaking and career-defining Thriller album will be scrutinized by the press, the public and, not least, by Jackson himself for even the vaguest hint that the King of Pop can’t hold his crown forever. Anyone within the gravitation pull of Michael Jackson needn’t look far for signs of the mind-boggling eccentricity that will, at least in the public mind, very quickly begin to overshadow a monumental talent.
#MJ HUMAN NATURE JACKET SKIN#
While promising the star and his protectors that MTV’s interests and intentions are solely about the music, the producer can’t resist poking around for signs of, well, anything, her interest piqued by overheard references to pill-popping, the pervasive atmosphere of tension, rumors of bleached skin and bobbed noses and chimpanzees and Elephant Man bones and hyperbaric oxygen chambers. Tavon Olds-Sample and Myles Frost as two Michaels in ‘MJ’ Matthew MurphyĬlearly, audiences shelling out big bucks to attend MJ have decided in favor of the man on stage, a fact the musical’s book, written by the double-Pulitzer winner Lynn Nottage, slyly acknowledges with repeated references to the art-versus-artist debate, here most often given voice by the musical’s single most clunky device: Nottage creates an MTV producer and cameraman to film Jackson as he prepares and rehearsals for the much anticipated world tour. Within the musical’s universe, t he closest MJ comes to confronting the topic is a vague reference to a family being invited on tour with the singer, but even that comment is open to interpretation: Is the business associate raising the issue merely worried about the expense of additional people on tour, or is he fretting about putting a young boy in such close proximity to the star? Is the reference’s sense of foreboding rooted in concern for victims of child abuse, or for a victim of scheming blackmailers? MJ ‘s unspoken response: Decide for yourself. The setting places the musical a year before the public accusations and police investigations that would shadow Michael Jackson until his death in 2009, and his legacy to this moment. The approach is, historically speaking, defendable: The events of MJ are set in 1992 as Jackson rehearses his upcoming Dangerous world tour.
To address the elephant man in the room: While MJ depicts Jackson’s drug problems, raises (if only to dismiss) charges of racial self-loathing, references the Bubbles-and-Joseph Merrick eccentricities, the third-rail allegations of child molestation go unstated if not entirely ignored. 'Almost Famous' Broadway Musical Announces Fall 2022 Arrival
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