As Jackson says so often if becomes a mantra, the Dangerous show must be perfect. The Dangerous tour and album will either return Jackson to the cultural pinnacle or simply return him to the earthly realm inhabited by the Madonnas and Bowies and Springsteens of the world. We’re told (if we need reminding) that the stakes for Jackson couldn’t be higher: Nine years after his enormously successful, groundbreaking and career-defining Thriller album will be scrutinized by the press, the public and, not least, by Jackson himself for even the vaguest hint that the King of Pop can’t hold his crown forever. Anyone within the gravitation pull of Michael Jackson needn’t look far for signs of the mind-boggling eccentricity that will, at least in the public mind, very quickly begin to overshadow a monumental talent.
#MJ HUMAN NATURE JOSEPH JACKSON SKIN#
While promising the star and his protectors that MTV’s interests and intentions are solely about the music, the producer can’t resist poking around for signs of, well, anything, her interest piqued by overheard references to pill-popping, the pervasive atmosphere of tension, rumors of bleached skin and bobbed noses and chimpanzees and Elephant Man bones and hyperbaric oxygen chambers. Tavon Olds-Sample and Myles Frost as two Michaels in ‘MJ’ Matthew MurphyĬlearly, audiences shelling out big bucks to attend MJ have decided in favor of the man on stage, a fact the musical’s book, written by the double-Pulitzer winner Lynn Nottage, slyly acknowledges with repeated references to the art-versus-artist debate, here most often given voice by the musical’s single most clunky device: Nottage creates an MTV producer and cameraman to film Jackson as he prepares and rehearsals for the much anticipated world tour. Within the musical’s universe, t he closest MJ comes to confronting the topic is a vague reference to a family being invited on tour with the singer, but even that comment is open to interpretation: Is the business associate raising the issue merely worried about the expense of additional people on tour, or is he fretting about putting a young boy in such close proximity to the star? Is the reference’s sense of foreboding rooted in concern for victims of child abuse, or for a victim of scheming blackmailers? MJ ‘s unspoken response: Decide for yourself. The setting places the musical a year before the public accusations and police investigations that would shadow Michael Jackson until his death in 2009, and his legacy to this moment. The approach is, historically speaking, defendable: The events of MJ are set in 1992 as Jackson rehearses his upcoming Dangerous world tour.
To address the elephant man in the room: While MJ depicts Jackson’s drug problems, raises (if only to dismiss) charges of racial self-loathing, references the Bubbles-and-Joseph Merrick eccentricities, the third-rail allegations of child molestation go unstated if not entirely ignored. Broadway's Covid-Hit 'Paradise Square', 'Macbeth', 'A Strange Loop' Cancel Additional Performances
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