MJ the Musical
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...