There’s always a contradiction embedded in things Michael Jackson. He was the adorable little boy who turned into an adult weirdo. He was the King of Pop and simultaneously a stunted manchild. The magic of the moonwalk is that he slides backward while seeming to step forward. If you’re thinking about being his baby, it don’t matter if you’re black or white.
Befitting this endemic duality, the biomusical MJ, which opened tonight at the Neil Simon, arrived in New York on simultaneous waves of both anticipation and apprehension. It has most of the ingredients of a jukebox hit—great songs, iconic dances, a rags-to-riches story—plus a prodigiously talented creative team. But it is also the story of a man with real problems, a man who quite likely committed some heinous crimes—and a man whose estate controls his life story and is involved with the production.
As it turns out, MJ is both wonderfully fun and predictably blinkered.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
The latter fact is probably unavoidable. But it’s also deeply awkward. MJ is big and loud; it is joyful and joyous. The music grooves, the dancing glides, the crowd bops. The spectacle is everything you expect. You enjoy Jackson’s work, you see his genius—but you never truly grapple with him as a character, because this hagiography cannot work if it asks you to. Michael Jackson is today a credibly accused child molester, and MJ succeeds only if you can ignore that fact.
“If you can get some brilliant artists to make a musical about your childhood, I highly recommend it,” Alison Bechdel once said about Fun Home, the Jeanine Tesori-Lisa Kron triumph based on her graphic memoir. MJ is made by some of the most brilliant. The bookwriter is Lynn Nottage, who has two Pulitzer Prizes, a Tony nomination, and, this season, the trifecta of a play, a musical, and an opera on Broadway; the director and choreographer is Christopher Wheeldon, who has his own Tony Award and a sterling resume that includes the Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, and his own transatlantic company, Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company.
Their obvious brief, given what’s on stage and the Jackson Estate’s involvement in the production, is to celebrate the good of Michael while ignoring the bad. They deliver impeccably.
Nottage built a Pompidou Center script: Its structure is showing, clearly, but that structure does what it needs to, and it elevates the whole to more than the sum of its parts.
There is a convenient setting, rehearsals for Jackson’s Dangerous World Tour in 1992, just before the first formal allegations of child molestation. There is a requisite framing device: An MTV crew on a behind-the-scenes assignment, ready to ask questions where needed and hear confessionals where required. As has become de rigeuer in these types of shows, there is a Big Michael (here called “MJ”), a Medium Michael (he’s “Michael”), and a “Little Michael.” There is a villain, Michael’s taskmaster father, Joseph, who is mean and demanding but, deep down, only because he so badly wants his sons to succeed.
Michael’s first few spoken lines efficiently establish that he’s a creative genius, a perfectionist, and quiet but kind. Other parts of the script are engineered to get points for hinting at controversies without ever addressing them: Dialogue references nonspecific “flack from the media” and “allegations”; “he’s battling demons I don’t understand,” one assistant says. Nottage is a talented architect.
Wheeldon has similarly delivered a slick, stylized, energized production, with choreography that captures and expands on the classic Jackson flair. His cast delivers exuberant if necessarily not heartfelt performances. Myles Frost, as MJ, perfectly nails the sinewy, slippery Jackson moves and mimics the breathy, naive manner, if not quite capturing the charisma that made Jackson an icon. Tavon Olds-Sample, as Michael, gets to have perhaps the most fun, embodying the middle-period Michael who has achieved global solo stardom but not yet been engulfed by it. And Christian Wilson, playing Little Michael at the performance I saw (he alternates with Walter Russell III), provided the only true jolt of joy in the show: When he first steps forward among his four brothers, you see the transcendent magic of the child star.
MJ tells Michael’s story—only till 1992, of course—mostly in flashbacks, and the action moves seamlessly from memory to memory. Most of the rest of the cast is doubled: Quentin Earl Darrington, for example, segues back and forth from demanding Joseph to MJ’s supportive tour director, Rob. (A doubled father figure.) Individual performances can get lost in the swirl, although Ayana George as Katherine, Michael’s mother, is a sensational standout.
All these performers, in Wheeldon’s hands (and with Paul Tazewell’s perfect costumes, Derek McLane’s sets, and Natasha Katz’s lighting), sell the music and the magic. But they are required to consistently ignore the man behind the curtain.
Indeed, the dramatic climax comes when rehearsal wraps up and the MTV reporter finally asks Michael some “tough” questions. It’s another moment of hinting at the real issues without really engaging them. Does he sleep in an oxygen chamber? “No! I started that rumor, I thought it would be funny. The chamber was actually to treat my burns. But, that’s not interesting, is it?” Plastic surgery? “This is Hollywood— who hasn’t gotten a new nose?” Bleaching his skin? “I have a skin condition called vitiligo. It has slowly been robbing me of my pigment.” This last part, per news reports of his obituary, is true. But none of these rumors is criminal.
It’s the ultimate contradiction: Jackson was unavoidably a victim. He was also a perpetrator. And MJ is a delight—so long as you forget that.
MJ opened February 1, 2022, at the Neil Simon Theatre. Tickets and information: mjthemusical.com
