MJ the Musical is moonwalking into the West End – but how do you tell a story like Michael Jackson’s?

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A Monument to Misconduct” splashed the Theatrely web site. “Very Smooth, Somewhat Criminal” echoed the New York Stage Review. “No One’s Looking at the Man in the Mirror” attested The New York Times. When the notices for the Broadway opening of Christopher Wheeldon and Lynne Nottage’s Michael Jackson jukebox jamboree MJ the Musical landed in 2022, many gushed about the “megawatt” music and its eye-popping dance routines, but few may get round the curtained-off elephant in the auditorium.

With the Jackson property concerned in the manufacturing, MJ the Musical is instructed in flashback from an endpoint of 1992’s Dangerous tour, one yr earlier than the allegations of kid abuse surfaced in opposition to pop’s greatest and most enigmatic celebrity. This naturally made for a conflicted watch for a lot of critics, significantly since two MTV journalists are forged as the villains of the piece for asking him intrusive questions on his monkey mates and cosmetic surgery, and a real-life Variety reporter was ejected from the premiere for asking the forged about the allegations.

Here was the rags-to-riches story of a tormented youngster star turned historic cultural phenomenon – one which was undeniably worthy of being instructed, remembered, and moonwalked poorly alongside to. But additionally one which reduce off at a important level, that sanitised and whitewashed a deeply stained legacy and reframed Jackson’s reminiscence in a spotless – and in the end extra profitable – mild.

Audiences have flocked, extra to jive than to evaluate. In two years, the musical has earned 10 Tony Award nominations, successful 4, and has taken $170m (£135m) from 1.1 million tickets offered in New York. And subsequent week, UK theatregoers will face the identical discomfiting dilemma, as MJ the Musical opens at London’s Prince Edward Theatre. Meanwhile, one other Jackson property collaboration – Antoine Fuqua’s forthcoming Jacko biopic Michael – has come beneath fireplace from Dan Reed, director of the 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, which shed recent mild and a spotlight on the tales of a number of of Jackson’s accusers.

“It seems that the press, his fans, and the vast older demographic who grew up loving Jackson are willing to set aside his unhealthy relationship with children and just go along with the music,” Reed wrote in The Guardian in February final yr. Claiming to have since seen a draft of the film’s script, he doubled down in a Sunday Times interview this month. “It’s an out-and-out attempt to completely rewrite the allegations and dismiss them out of hand, and contains complete lies,” he stated. “You never even see him alone with any boys, when it is a matter of fact that he shared his bed with small children for many years.”

When your present is nothing with out permission to make use of the music, but it appears the property is hellbent on scrubbing clear their money cow’s popularity, how do you tell a story like Jackson’s? His music and achievements are the stuff of pop historical past – the best-selling solo artist of all time, 15 Grammys, 400 million items shifted, and songs comparable to “Thriller”, “Billie Jean”, “Bad” and “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough” embedded into the core of widespread tradition, and that’s earlier than you even contact on The Jackson 5. But no critical evaluation of this deeply eccentric, charmed/cursed life can brush beneath the carpet the scandals that dogged his ultimate a long time.

To recap: in 1993 – amid a lot secretive, big-money deal brokering and story promoting – Jackson was accused of molesting 13-year-old Jordan Chandler, certainly one of quite a few kids the star was alleged to have spent nights in mattress with at his Neverland ranch and elsewhere. With different kids claiming to not have been abused by Jackson, and the singer denying all wrongdoing, that case was settled out of court docket for round $23m. Since Chandler subsequently refused to testify, no legal expenses had been introduced, by means of lack of proof from an 18-month investigation that included 400 interviews.

A 1994 PBS Frontline documentary, Tabloid Truth: The Michael Jackson Story, set about exposing the profiteering that went on round the media’s frenzy for Jackson abuse tales, along with his workers usually taking their proof to the press for payouts earlier than telling the police. In 1997, Jackson gained a $2.7m civil swimsuit in opposition to Victor Gutierrez, the creator of a e-book claiming to be primarily based on Chandler’s diaries from the time, who had alleged that Jackson’s nephew, Jeremy, was a sufferer of Jackson’s abuse.

Jackson’s dependence on painkillers deepened, his well being suffered to the level the place he claimed he wanted to be fed intravenously, and he misplaced a number of multimillion-pound contracts as a results of the scandal. With no conviction in opposition to him, it ought to have been potential to place the case behind him, significantly when the OJ Simpson trial arrived to overshadow it. But his 1995 album HIStory stored the story recent in the public’s thoughts, awash because it was with Jackson’s reactions to what the monitor “Stranger in Moscow” referred to as his “swift and sudden fall from grace”.

And in 2003, additional accusations surfaced in the wake of Martin Bashir’s ITV documentary Living with Michael Jackson, through which the star defended his apply of sharing his bed room with kids (claiming he slept on the flooring) and was filmed holding arms with 12-year-old former most cancers affected person Gavin Arviso.

Amid requires Jackson to lose custody of his kids, his staff launched a two-hour rebuttal documentary The Michael Jackson Interview: The Footage You Were Never Meant to See. Nonetheless, legal expenses had been introduced after Arviso instructed police that Jackson had abused him a number of occasions when he was 13, having proven him pornography and given him wine in soda cans, which Arviso stated he referred to as “Jesus juice”.

During the trial, Jason Francia, the son of certainly one of Jackson’s housemaids, additionally claimed he had been abused at Neverland between the ages of seven and 10, contradicting his 1993 assertion to police, and a number of other witnesses attested to seeing Jackson molest youngster actor Macaulay Culkin. Appearing for the defence, nonetheless, Culkin denied Jackson had assaulted him. Jackson was in the end acquitted of all expenses.

Despite the verdict, and even earlier than so-called “cancel culture” had the on-line infrastructure to wield main cultural affect, the affect on Jackson’s life and profession was devastating. He struggled to search out sponsors and merchandise companions for his sell-out excursions, and in 2021, a choose noticed that the greatest pop star in the world had “earned not a penny from his image and likeness in 2006, 2007, or 2008, [showing] the effect those allegations had, and continued to have, until his death”. Almost 20 years later, his acquittal additionally poses a dilemma to a new era of music and humanities shoppers raised on condemnation: the proof appears substantial, but the authorized conclusion was decisive.

With no additional expenses potential following Jackson’s loss of life in 2009, we’ve now entered the period of trial by posthumous media. In 2013, Australian choreographer Wade Robson reversed the testimony he had given at the 2005 trial, to assert that Jackson had abused him over seven years as a youngster. The following yr, one other former underage Neverland houseguest James Safechuck additionally refuted his personal testimony from 1993 to make comparable claims. Lawsuits from each in opposition to the Jackson property and his firms had been dismissed, but Reed’s Leaving Neverland doc, specializing in their tales, revived questions round Jackson’s conduct.

Again, the Jackson staff produced a rebuttal movie, 2019’s Michael Jackson: Chase the Truth, which struggled to persuade viewers that the surprising and transferring testimonies from Wade and Safechuck in Reed’s movie had been inaccurate and financially motivated.

That strand of the story is about to be rebooted. The dismissal of the fits introduced by Wade and Safechuck was overturned by a Californian appeals court docket, which determined that Jackson’s firms might be held liable for his actions. Their instances will lastly come to court docket shortly, with the accusers pushing for a trial date earlier than the Michael biopic’s April 2025 debut in an effort to hinder the property “rewriting the history”.

In the meantime, MJ the Musical arrives into a confused sense of ethical malaise. With so many heritage acts having their interviews, X/Twitter feeds, and out-of-print autobiographies scoured for doubtlessly career-ending ethical or legal transgressions, followers are being compelled to numb themselves in opposition to the potential crimes, bigotries and wrongthink of their musical heroes, or else forged away enormous swathes of the music they love. It’s why Jacko superfans have stuffed the aisles of MJ nightly, arguing each publicly and internally that a lack of authorized conviction justifies their each sparkle-gloved crotch-grab. The dazzle in the songs, for a lot of, obliterates the shadows round the man.

Alongside the high-functioning evolution of our communal radar for offence, nonetheless, we’ve additionally honed a eager scent for cynicism. Whenever an artist’s property is concerned in a biographical manufacturing, nearly at all times downplaying or brushing over the much less savoury and unfavourable facets of the star’s life, it turns into a dissatisfying, discomfiting expertise that the discerning viewer is reluctant to condone. It treats us all like helpful ticket-snaffling idiots, pawns in a multibillion-dollar PR recreation.

It was there in the glossing over of James Brown’s home abuse in 2014 biopic Get on Up, in the tongue-in-cheek pantomime booing of the Ike Turner actor at the finish of jukebox musical Tina, and it reaches its apex with MJ the Musical. It’s a enjoyable evening out, we get it. But until such tales are delivered with honesty, transparency, and sometimes some very darkish residence truths laid naked, theirs is a guilt-tainted boogie.