This Michael Jackson musical may be OTT, but you can’t beat it!
MY FIRST reaction when the opening tune, Beat It, hit me in the chest at the start of this Michael Jackson musical was to laugh out loud. The reaction was totally unexpected, and I spent the rest of the spectacularly staged, exuberantly performed and scrupulously sanitised show (tinkling with Tony awards from Broadway) trying to work out why.
Christopher Wheeldon’s production sets itself up in a rehearsal studio for MJ’s 1992 ‘Dangerous’ world tour. Here, a rookie documentary team cue flashbacks of his life in Lynn Nottage’s rigorously anodyne script that often sounds like legally approved excerpts from Wikipedia.
Her round-up covers run-ins with his bullying father, Joseph, as well as MJ’s travails with painkillers (which eventually killed him).
elsewhere, Nottage delicately attributes his skin lightening to the dermatological disorder vitiligo, and more or less sets aside his terrifying facial reconstruction, before tiptoeing around controversy over the children who passed through his ‘Neverland’ estate.
Instead, the big take-home is the huge sonic wallop of MJ’s back catalogue, in a show that’s also inadvertently hilarious.
Jackson was a meek and mild megalomaniac who insisted on being propelled into the air from a giant toaster for his concert tour. The stunt defied safety, sanity, solvency and the laws of physics in his mission to become a literal Pop-Tart.
But I really had to contain myself after the interval, when he slipped that trademark spangly glove onto his right hand, whispering prayerfully in his helium voice, ‘The Glove!’ Incredibly, Myles Frost in the title role seems to take MJ even more seriously than MJ took himself. But good on him. His nimble performance is astonishing — showing us the birth of that famous vocal yelp, the crotch- clutching hip-pumps and the foot-sliding, egyptian-style moonwalk with tilted trilby. His extraordinary agility and vocal technique make it impossible to believe the legend himself has not risen again for easter.
Frost even succeeds in eclipsing the scarcely less dazzling bodypopping and vocal warbling of Mitchell Zhangazha as Jackson’s awkward teenage self. and Zhangazha’s brother, ashley, tellingly doubles as Michael’s despotic father and obsequious manager — thereby distilling in one figure MJ’s psychological battles with fear and control.
What will be remembered of this show otherwise is Wheeldon’s endtoend choreography, which is tighter than a g-string on a hippopotamus and goes toe to toe with Jackson’s perfectionism over two and a half hours.
ebbing and flowing between the studio rehearsals and stadium blowouts, it climaxes in a thumping rendition of Thriller, staged as a zombie graveyard shift in a Mexican-style Day Of The Dead circus setting — OTT doesn’t come close. Whatever it covers up, the show has a potent understanding of what MJ meant when he insisted he needed to ‘feel’ his song and dance routines. and do we feel them too? Hell, yeah.
Maybe that’s why I laughed.