The other day I saw MJ The Musical at the Prince Edward Theatre. It had transferred from Broadway. You might say it’s a jukebox musical cashing in a back catalogue of outstanding hits from the king of pop. There was a sell-out audience.
Of course, as a parent and as a founder of a youth people’s organisation, I am queasy about Michael Jackson’s private life. In 2019, we cut Thriller from our Albert Hall performance that year. The documentary revelations about him were raw and it seemed the right thing to do. Some people will be forever set against him and I respect that.
And yet the music endures. Can you separate the person from what they create? I don’t know. We know he was something of a tortured soul and the musical certainly explored the difficult relationship he had with his father. Cleverly the actor playing the father also played the tour manager who was adding pressure to the mix. By the end of the story, he also came into the set-piece Thriller routine as a malevolent figure controlling the demons around Michael Jackson. The musical uses the final rehearsals for the Dangerous Tour of 1992 as the background to the action and the hits come pouring out.
A journalist and cameraman have access to Michael and act as a framing device to ask questions. It’s a bit clunky, tiresome even but it adds more pressure on this famously perfectionist artist. What works better is the constant throwback to his days with the Jackson Five and the Motown era. More hits but also some backstory about life on the road as a child star with an overbearing and unkind father.
Three actors play Michael Jackson at different stages in his life and this allows the story to jump backwards and forwards in time and let him rerun his past and even join it. The songs are used sometimes to explore the thoughts of the characters with some lyrics hitting the spot. Sometimes it works, sometimes it feels trite.
I happened to be in north London at an open-air concert in August 1992 and I can still remember the pulsating sound that poured across from Wembley Stadium. He was undeniably a great showman and a ground-breaking artist. We might be repulsed by who he was as a person but we can still respect his musical gifts for what they were.
I think his music will live on because it is so good. You can separate the music from the man and while this musical didn’t explore the seedier side of his soul you came away with renewed respect for the songs he made and his journey as a professional artist. In the end, I think that is what will remain.
