My Jackson musical won’t hide his flaws
THE writer of a musical backed by Michael Jackson’s estate has pledged that the show will not ignore the explosive allegations about the singer’s predatory behaviour towards underage boys.
Playwright Lynn Nottage, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, told me Jackson was a genius, ‘ but an immensely flawed human being’.
She also revealed that she believed the testimony given by Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who were close to the singer in their pre-teen years, in the C4 and HBO documentary Leaving Neverland. The two men recounted how Jackson had seduced and sexually violated them when they were children (one just seven years old).
Nottage, breaking her silence about Jackson for the first time, told me: ‘I think they were telling the truth.’
Jackson’s estate and Columbia Live Stage hired Nottage, one of America’s most honoured contemporary dramatists, and Christopher Wheeldon, a director and choreographer who’s also artistic associate of the Royal Ballet, to write and direct the musical Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough, marrying a story to a catalogue of Jackson’s hits.
Nottage won the Pulitzer in 2009, for Ruined, and two years ago for Sweat. (The latter, critically acclaimed when it ran at the Donmar, will transfer to the Gielgud on June 7 for a limited run of 50 performances.)
Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough was due to open in Chicago this year before heading to Broadway. But its postponement was announced just before Leaving Neverland had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
According to recent statements, the musical will now go straight to Broadway in 2020.
Nottage told me that she has
to figure out if there is a ‘way to tell a story about someone who was a genius, but an immensely flawed human being’.
When I asked if Jackson’s estate would allow her to explore the dark side of the superstar’s life, Nottage responded: ‘I hope so.’ She added: ‘I think it would be a dishonour to the complexity of who he is and the situation [he was in] to gloss over everything. WE But how we do it, I don’t know.’ discussed whether you should continue watching or playing an artist’s work once something unsavoury has been uncovered.
‘My life tracks with Michael Jackson, musically. The very first album I owned was ABC and I thought: “Can I never listen to that album again?”
‘Off The Wall is an album that I absolutely adore. Can I no longer listen to that? It means erasing my cultural DNA.’
Nottage observed that if you stop listening to Michael Jackson because of his predatory behaviour towards children, ‘then you stop listening to Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis’.
Was Jackson trying to tell us about his troubles through his music? ‘I actually read the lyrics of his songs in ways that people, when they’re dancing, aren’t listening to. And you realise that he was working out his angst and pain through his music. You hear his struggle.’
You see the struggle, too. ‘ Michael Jackson was an incredibly self- destructive human being. He destroyed himself, not just on the inside, but on the outside,’ Nottage said, referring to the star’s constant tampering with his pigmentation and the many times he went under the scalpel to alter his facial features, particularly his nose.
‘He wanted to disappear, and he was telling us that.’
She added: ‘We had this wilfulness not to know how much pain he was in. We turned away, but we knew, on some fundamental level, that something was going on and we refused to see that.
‘You can still have empathy for someone, for people who do bad things. But you have to understand why.’