Theatre 2025: MJ the Musical

While I love musical theatre, I am less fond of juke box musicals that use well-known songs from other sources that are force-fit into a plot instead of new songs written specifically for an original story.  Even less to my taste are the subset of jukebox musicals that are biographical musicals, where the plot is the life story of a musician or band.  For me, this is just laziness since neither the music nor the plot is original and usually the songs are diegetic and the lyrics do not advance the storyline at all, as songs from a good book musical would.

Based on the life and oeuvre of Michael Jackson, dubbed “The King of Pop”, MJ the Musical is the latest biopic to come to Toronto.  Three actors play Jackson at various stages of his life including “Little Michael”, teenager/young adult “Michael” and Adult Michael who is always referred to as “MJ”.  The show opens with MJ and his company rehearsing for his 1992 Dangerous tour.  Always striving for potentially unattainable perfection, MJ pushes his crew relentlessly and constantly demands to add more and more special effects, causing expenses to get out of control to the despair of his tour manager Rob and accountant Dave. 

Added as a plot device to generate exposition, the characters of an MTV reporter Rachel and her cameraman Alejandro arrive to interview MJ. This leads him to reminisce about his childhood and rise to fame as part of his family’s singing group The Jackson Five as well as his demanding, abusive father Joseph and supportive mother Katherine.  While most of the songs during the rehearsal and the flashback performances are sung in diegetic fashion, other scenes used  Jackson’s songs to convey emotion and advance the plot.  When Little Michael complains about how hard his father is pushing the group, Joseph sings “It’s The Price of Fame, don’t you ever complain .. don’t be feeling no pain” quoting a song from Jackson’s Bad 25 Album.  Katherine comforts Little Michael and tells him “Just call my name and I’ll Be There”.   When Young Adult Michael feels despair of ever breaking through beyond R&B stations, music producer Quincy Jones encourages him with the song “Keep the Faith”.  MJ sings various songs to illustrate his loneliness, isolation and vulnerability including “Stranger in Moscow”, “She’s Out of My Life”, “Human Nature” and “Man in the Mirror”.  One of the most creative uses of Jackson’s songs to show Little Michael’s emotional pain and fear caused by his father’s oppression was a slowed version of “Thriller” where “something evil’s lurking in the dark” takes on a new meaning.  As part of the choreography, Joseph manipulates Michael like a puppet on a string.

Through Rachel’s interview questions, there are references to some of Jackson’s controversies at the time including his Neverland Ranch, Bozo the Chimp, oxygen chamber, and the whitening of his skin.  But because the plot takes place in 1992, the 1993 accusations of child abuse had not arisen yet so the show could legitimately avoid addressing them.  The actor Devin Bowles played both Rob the stage manager and Joseph Jackson.  It was impressive how seamlessly Bowles switched between the two roles, sometimes seemingly in mid sentence, making it obvious by body posture and Joseph's limp.

The actor Jordan Markus who played MJ was perfectly cast to resemble Michael Jackson at that stage of his life, with a frail and lanky but athletic body, stringy hair and an emancipated look.  He did a terrific job of emulating Michael Jackson’s speech pattern, movements and especially his dance moves.  He captured all of Jackson’s signature moves including the moonwalk, toe-stand, and all of his gestures, gyrations and crotch grabbing.  In fact, the dancing and choreography were probably the best parts of the musical.  The songs were entertaining for the most part but because of the poor sound quality at Ed Mirvish Theatre (which we complain about constantly), many of the lyrics were muffled.  In particular when singing Billie Jean, inexplicably MJ covered his hand over his mouth for some of the lyrics, which made the sound carry that much less.  There also seemed to be something wrong with the iconic single glove which did not seem to fit onto his hand and felt like he was waving a giant Mickey Mouse glove as he was dancing.

In the end, I am still not fond of biographical Jukebox musicals but at least I was very familiar with and actually like Michael Jackson’s music.