MJ The Musical London reviews Round-up

"Dark and dazzling production exposes singer’s late career for the haunted circus it was"

"Nods to the looming abuse scandal are kept to a minimum, but there’s sufficient darkness in Lynn Nottage’s production to tarnish MJ’s over-exploited stardom"

"... miraculously, MJ the Musical doesn’t feel like just another cash grab – and that’s all thanks to the formidable writing muscle of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage (Sweat, Clyde’s), who exposes Jackson’s late career for the haunted circus it was."

"... her book’s biggest strength is the way it exposes Jackson through his songs, showing how he increasingly danced to the rhythms of past traumas."

"Flashbacks to Michael’s horrendous childhood show his father Joseph (Ashley Zhangazha) drilling The Jackson 5 like circus animals: when he claps, they flinch."

"As the grown-up MJ, Myles Frost moves with a dreamy, fantastically eerie lightness... He’s the ringleader of his own circus now, and having sacrificed his childhood and health (suffering horrific burns in a stage accident) to someone else’s dream, he’s not willing to compromise ever again – however financially or morally ruinous the consequences might be."

"Derek McLane’s impossibly lavish scenic design and a universally strong cast capture the stratospheric ambition of a singer who wanted to be a spaceman, a superhero, an alien."

"A ravishing spectacle if you ignore the elephant in the room"

"This retelling of the King of Pop’s backstory to 1992 is full of pizzaz... but then the dubiousness of the enterprise sinks back in"

"The best and worst thing about this exhilarating Michael Jackson musical is that it *almost* makes you forget the elephant in the room."

"If you can blind yourself to this moral sophistry, Christopher Wheeldon’s production is a superlatively directed and choreographed piece of absolute pizzaz. Beat It, Smooth Criminal, Thriller, Can You Feel It? – the hits from a stunning 43-year body of work keep on coming, accompanied with precision-drilled evocations of groundbreaking dance routines."

"That the show still works is largely down to the half-quicksilver, half-machine performance of Frost, who originated the role of MJ on Broadway and won every award going."

"The show builds towards a joyful dramatic coup before the curtain about which I’ll say just two words: toaster lift. You leave ravished by the spectacle of it all, with countless earworms lodged in your head, and then the moral dubiousness of the enterprise sinks back in."

"Michael Jackson — how do you make a musical about a pariah?"

"MJ: the Musical is a sensation but there’s an elephant on the dancefloor"

"It’s a tribute. It’s a jaw-droppingly well staged, fabulously sung and fluidly choreographed act of necromancy. It’s the career story of one of the most talented performers of our lifetimes."

"It is sometimes clunky, but never dull. If it doesn’t contain every last one of the hits, that’s only because Jackson had too many of them to be crammed into his own jukebox musical."

"You may be wondering how this mega-budget show addresses its moonwalking elephant in the room, the allegations of child sexual abuse that surfaced in 1993... f so, you won’t be surprised to hear that it doesn’t. The Jackson we see is eccentric, troubled, impish, imperious, soft-spoken yet steely — but the worst abuse he dishes out is to be too demanding on his dancers."

"Myles Frost won a Tony for his turn as Jackson in MJ: The Musical on Broadway. He remains a phenomenon here. If for the first few minutes you wonder quite what you are watching, it doesn’t take long to sink into the fiction that, yup, this is Michael Jackson."

"Dazzling night celebrating the musical legacy of King of Pop"

"With a book by double Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage and choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, it was always going to be a class act."

"You get plenty of bang for your buck in this bio-musical about the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. With a book by double Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage and choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, it was always going to be a class act."

"... what we get is a dazzling celebratory run through his greatest hits performed with spectacular precision by an A Class ensemble and backed by an astonishingly versatile band."

"Some may consider this a hollow, vacuous enterprise but this is show business, folks, and it is his artistic, not personal, legacy that is being celebrated. Any attempt to cancel a man who has already been cancelled by God is a redundant exercise. The music stands. The songs are amazing. Let that be enough."

"Christopher Wheeldon and Lynn Nottage tread carefully with the gloriously danced story of Michael Jackson"

"... Myles Frost, from the original show, who stands out"

"His speaking voice is spot-on: soft, fey, wistful. His singing voice is less than ideal and sometimes seems on automatic pilot. But he is scintillatingly elegant in the remastering of Billie Jean"

"What comes over most strongly, when not performing, is that this Jackson, as sometimes in life, has the look of a victim"

"“But is it perfect?” Jackson asks himself at the end, to which, although this is a fab show, the answer would have to be: “No.”"

"Myles Frost is extraordinary as the King of Pop, but ultimately Michael Jackson feels too complicated a subject for a jukebox bio-musical"

"‘MJ the Musical’ is the real deal, however, an estate-endorsed jukebox show that’s gone down a storm on Broadway. Significantly, it has a book by Lynn Nottage, one of the great American playwrights. Her text addresses aspects of Jackson’s life with a frankness that’s refreshing, if selective."

"‘MJ’ thus avoids any allusion to said controversy. At the same time, it doesn’t do that thing where it pretends there was nothing unusual about him: there are allusions to everything from Bubbles the chimp to Jackson’s changing skin colour."

"Michael is played by the jaw-droppingly talented original Broadway star Myles Frost. To say he’s a triple threat would be an understatement: in the acting department he’s maybe more of a vague menace, but as a dancer and singer he is extraordinary."

"Still, in trying to give us a somewhat unvarnished view of Jackson, the omission of any allusion to his friendships with children feels… noticeable. ‘Giving us’ his drug problems almost feels like a sop, making up for what the show doesn’t talk about. Nottage has written something infinitely superior to ‘Thriller – Live’. But there are clearly places she is not allowed to go."

"You take it for granted that a big-budget Michael Jackson show will feature an immaculate setlist and superb choreography. And you absolutely get that in ‘MJ’, which is directed and choreographed by actual ballet legend Wheeldon."

"24-carat karaoke anchored by sleek dance moves"

"If the day comes when musicals are created by artificial intelligence they may well resemble this jukebox show. It’s proficient, but oddly soulless."

"For the uncommitted, Christopher Wheeldon’s production offers an immaculately choreographed evening of 24-carat karaoke anchored by the sleek dance moves of its Tony-winning star Myles Frost."

"Given that the venture has been created “by special arrangement with the estate of Michael Jackson”, it’s no surprise that Lynn Nottage’s script skirts the most lurid allegations about the singer’s private life... What’s more unsettling, in a way, is that Nottage, one of America’s sharpest playwrights, has come up with such a laboured book."

"But while we get fleeting references to painkillers, nose jobs and the skin condition vitiligo, the dance sequences assume priority. It will take another, much more candid show to tell the full story of this very American tragedy."

"A dazzlingly well-executed Jacko jukebox musical – but the elephant in the room is very big indeed"

"Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s show beautifully honours the star’s art but completely sidesteps the troubling allegations"

"... this Tony-garlanded Broadway juggernaut, which lands in London with a largely new British cast ahead of a world tour, stubbornly, and undoubtedly expediently, refuses to venture a day beyond the tour’s opening night on June 27, 1992."

"Which is not to say that demons don’t stalk original cast member Myles Frost’s uncannily well incarnated Jackson in this superior jukebox musical, which – to the irresistible beat of Jackson’s biggest (and several much smaller) hits – fluently dramatises the way his psychologically damaging childhood consistently bore down on his inner life."

"And goodness can Frost dance, capturing precisely Jackson’s sublime, peculiarly agitated grace... Blending a pop-video aesthetic with simply superb choreography, Wheeldon doesn’t stint on the big numbers – although he keeps us waiting for a nightmarishly reimagined Thriller in which Jackson is stalked by carnivalesque grotesques and a leering ringmaster."

"MJ The Musical is not exactly an apologia, but while it refuses to indulge the tabloid image of Jackson as a freak, it’s arguably guilty of magical thinking in casting him exclusively as a victim."

"Myles Frost is an eerily good Michael Jackson"

"From the opening seconds of Frost’s astonishing performance, we understand that we are in the presence of something special"

"Michael Jackson the man might be a tricky proposition nowadays, but Michael Jackson the musician remains an undimmable legend. This high-energy jukebox show arrives from Broadway, where it continues to play, trailing a handful of Tony Awards. The musical numbers and dazzling choreography are unbeatable, yet there is something of a hole where the innermost heart of the piece ought to be. The man in the mirror stays elusively, frustratingly just out of reach."

"Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage tries to add some heft to the hagiography, but seems somewhat constrained, perhaps by the fact that the Michael Jackson Estate is one of the partners on the project."

"The limber Frost has Jackson’s sinuous snake hips and knees-with-inbuilt-springs, which means all the dance moves in director/choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s fizzing production (blessed as it is with a notably skilled ensemble) are impeccable."

"Ardent Jackson fans will have no truck with such quibbles; for everyone else it will not be quite so Black or White."

"Tedious Michael Jackson jukebox show can’t get started"

"Wearyingly trite production portrays the late singer as a saintly perfectionist"

"Soft-spoken, charitable, visionary, an exacting but kindly boss, quick with a smile and an inspiring phrase: not since Jesus Christ Superstar has the West End hosted such a saintly protagonist as the hero of MJ the Musical, aka Michael Jackson."

"The only flaw of this Jackson is perfectionism, drummed into him during childhood by his violent father."

"A more challenging staging might have taken this hinge point in his life — at the peak of fame, yet on the verge of a controversy that would torpedo his reputation — and made something interesting from it. But unsurprisingly that isn’t the Jackson estate’s ambition for MJ the Musical. Despite its pedigree — the book is by playwright Lynn Nottage, the only woman to win two Pulitzer prizes for drama, while ballet eminence Christopher Wheeldon is director and choreographer — the production’s main rationale is to get as many songs on the jukebox as possible. Cue ecstatic applause for “Thriller”, “Billie Jean” etc."

"The evening boils down to a decent Michael Jackson impersonator doing song and dance routines, padded out with an inert storyline, trite dialogue and hagiographic characterisation."

"Sterilised moonwalk through the King of Pop’s life"

"The jukebox musical has gravity defying dancing and all the megahits, but it’s hard to ignore the glaringly unpleasant biographical absence"

"The musical, set during the rehearsal period of the Dangerous world tour in 1992 – coincidentally a year before any sexual allegations were made against him – seems to wipe away almost all the scandal that surrounded Jackson."

"MJ the Musical is a sterilised swirl through the life of the King of Pop, but in reality, it is no black or white tale."

"Since the harrowing 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, it is hard to ignore the repeated allegations of child sexual abuse. Yet Lynn Nottage’s script does just that and instead focuses on the mind of a troubled celebrity."

"His big hits are met with glee from the audience"

"As MJ the Musical’s wild ideas burst into a mesmerising reality, the stage becomes a hub of neon and gravity-defying dance moves. It would be remiss to say Jackson’s songs do not possess an otherworldly magic."

"Slick and sanitised"

"Choreography is the star in this bland, morally questionable jukebox biomusical"

"... Lynn Nottage’s book is, at best, workaday and, at worst, excruciatingly contrived"

"No surprise that it was created in collaboration with the Michael Jackson estate; director-choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s production is as slick as it is sanitised."

"The faithful will doubtless flock to the box office, just as they do on Broadway, where it opened in 2021. And if they moonwalk away satisfied, it will be because of a phenomenal central performance from Myles Frost, and Wheeldon’s choreography, which is an undeniable wonder. "