If you’re of a certain age, you have history (HIStory, perhaps?) with Michael Jackson. I remember getting ‘Thriller’ on cassette as a kid. ‘Dangerous’ was one of the first CDs I ever owned. I remember seeing the extended music video for ‘Thriller’ on VHS, which came packaged with a behind-the-scenes documentary. One woman, cornered for a quick vox pop at one of the filming locations, asserted that she loved Jackson because he was “down to earth”, which is darkly hilarious in hindsight.
Down to earth? The press called him “wacko Jacko” – we all did. He slept in a hyperbaric chamber. He owned the Elephant Man’s skeleton. His skin kept getting paler, his nose thinner. What a weird guy! Was any of it true? Hard to say.
Even today, when a careless tweet is like a drop of blood in a shark tank to fans and journos alike, the media furor around Michael Jackson stands as one of the most frenetic in living memory, eclipsing the likes of Beatlemania. Jackson wasn’t bigger than God, he was God to a lot of people – the King of Pop, the first Black artist to smash through the MTV colour barrier, an artist, an icon, a living legend. Then came the allegations of child sexual abuse, which first began in August 1993, and continue to this day. For those who were still on the fence, the documentary Leaving Neverland, released in 2019, saw many more fans abandon Jackson, who died in 2009 at the age of 50.
And so, it makes sense that MJ the Musical would set Jackson’s relationship with the media as its thematic tentpole, and it makes sense that the show is set in 1992, on the eve of his big comeback, the Dangerous World Tour – before the allegations surfaced, before the sequins began to fall off the glove. Pulitzer-winning dramatist Lynn Nottage (Clyde’s, Sweat), who wrote the book for MJ, uses an extended interview as a framing device, with fictional MTV reporter Rachel (Penny McNamee) and her camera man, Alejandro (Yashith Fernando) on hand to record a fluff piece as Jackson (Roman Banks) and his dancers rehearse under the direction of producer Rob (Derrick Davis). Rachel seeks something deeper and more revealing than usual, and so we ping-pong back and forth in time as Jackson recounts his story – or, at least, his version of his story (which, you may notice, is mostly focused on the moments in which he was either victim or victorious, and not much else).
If you, like many, can no longer bring yourself to engage with Jackson’s music, there’s nothing here that will change your mind
This kind of idolising, idealising jukebox musical is nothing new, of course. We recently had both Tina - The Tina Turner Musical and Elvis: A Musical Revolution – the former enjoyable enough, even if it struggled to marry the darker elements of Tina Turner’s life with its upbeat, triumphant musical numbers; and the latter fairly rote and uninspired. On the whole, MJ is more successful than either. (That is, as far as surface-level celebrity tributes go).
It’s more formally daring, for one thing, both in terms of its structure and certain creative choices. Jackson himself is played by a total of six performers, who often appear on stage with each other. Brisbane-based newcomer Liam Damons (in his professional debut) plays the young Michael, struggling to establish his own identity separate from the Jackson Five, while Jackson as a child is played by Blaiyze Barksdale with William Bonner (or Cayden Dosoruth with Daniel Makunike, depending on which night you catch). In addition to tour producer Rob, Derrick Davis also portrays Joseph Jackson, Michael’s stern and abusive father, who forged his sons into a world-beating musical act with merciless discipline. It’s a smart wrinkle that contrasts Jackson’s relationship with both authority figures – cowed by his father, but barely held in check by his producer, whose power over the performer is curbed by Jackson’s sheer star power.
Indeed, we’re deliberately made to get a measure of Jackson as a character by the way he interacts with others – there are no monologues revealing the inner life of the man to be found here. As we follow Jackson from his beginnings in hardscrabble Gary, Indiana, through his child star years performing with his brothers, to his early solo successes working with producer Quincy Jones (Conlon Bonner), to his then-current status as something as close to a mythological figure as we get in the modern age – an unknowable and capricious pixie, imbued with vast talent that borders on the magical, but ultimately an enigma.
American actor Roman Banks (who reprises his role from the US national tour) is simply incredible in the central role, and while his impersonation of Jackson’s voice and mannerisms are top notch, it’s the mercurial quality he brings to the role that resonates. Meanwhile, as the younger, pre-surgery, pre-Pepsi-fire Jackson, Liam Damons is portraying a recognisably human figure, someone struggling with their own artistry and sense of identity. But Banks is playing something… other, and whether the figure he has become was self-created or is an identity forged for him and forced upon him by the media is the play’s central question. Certainly, the media comes in for a serious drubbing here – Jackson’s musical tirade against the tabloids, ‘They Don’t Care About Us’, caps the first act, with Banks’ Jackson almost swallowed up by a troupe of trenchcoat-clad dancers portraying his journalistic nemeses.
The songs are, unsurprisingly, incredible – Jackson’s ascendancy to the pop firmament was not accidental, and as expected the songbook here takes us through his greatest hits, from opening banger ‘Beat It’ with its sizzling Eddie Van Halen-crafted guitar solo, to Jackson Five classics such as ‘ABC’ and ‘I Want You Back’, through to ‘Bad’, ‘Billie Jean’, and, of course, ‘Thriller’.
Orchestrations and arrangements by David Holcenberg and Jason Michael Webb are clever and enervating, threading the rhythm of the music through the dialogue scenes – you hear a note from ‘Thriller’, for example, long before the actual number – and smoothing the transitions from dramatic scenes to set pieces. The set design by Derek McLane and lighting by Natasha Katz do a similarly nimble job – we got from the backstage chaos of rehearsal to the Jackson family’s working-class home and to the stage at a rapid clip – and while the dazzling lights and projections by Peter Nigrini hit the high notes, the dexterous transitions from the intimate to the epic are genuinely impressive.
So, too, is the choreography by director Christopher Wheeldon, while the character of Jackson has a dedicated two-man team in the form of lauded choreographers Rich + Tone Talauega. Again, the flow is incredible, and the sense of motion is ever-present. We never get the sense that the show has stopped moving to drop some exposition on us; every movement is precise and meaningful, every gesture a part of the greater whole. On a technical level, MJ is superb.
But then there’s that elephant in the room – the allegations against Jackson. The script’s hesitation around how deeply to pry into this topic, let alone any of Jackson’s adult life (his wives and children get no mention, but Bubbles the chimp does get a nod) shows up as awkward, rather wooden dialogue. Perhaps, this production’s sympathetic depiction of Michael Jackson is the one that will appease the ticketholders: a dancing marionette in the likeness of a beloved entertainer. Best not to reckon with the darker complexities of the elusive man (or his alleged victims).
MJ being an estate-approved production, the spotlight was never going to be pointed in the direction of those dark shadows, and to expect otherwise is foolish. Nonetheless, Nottage alludes to such things in her dialogue, very occasionally directly, but frequently in exchanges loaded with possible meanings (“Do you hear the awful things they’re saying about me?”). It’s the best we could hope for, perhaps – a little uncomfortable shading in what would otherwise be a wholly sanitised “print the legend” production.
If the troubling aspects of Michael Jackson’s stories have affected audience attendance, you’d be hard-pressed to pinpoint where; sold-out seasons on Broadway and in the West End certainly demonstrate the appeal of MJ the Musical, and the Sydney season (which was brought Down Under by major musical producer Michael Cassel) looks set to replicate that success. If you, like many, can no longer bring yourself to engage with Jackson’s music, there’s nothing here that will change your mind. But it’s definitely a more complex production than we might have expected – call it a flashy tribute show with footnotes, perhaps.
MJ the Musical is now playing at the Sydney Lyric Theatre through to June 2025. Tickets are on sale at mjthemusical.com.au.
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