If you’ve heard good reports about MJ the Musical, believe them all and multiply everything by a hundred. As a music-and-dance spectacular, the show is as exhilarating as any Jackson produced while he was alive. The sets, the costumes, the choreography and the live band deliver an amazing collective punch.
When he removes his black trilby he looks like Rishi Sunak at a karaoke bar
The script, by Lynn Nottage, takes us into Jackson’s twisted personal history. He was one of ten children raised in a four-room shack in Gary, Indiana, by weirdo parents. His mother was a Jehovah’s Witness who refused to celebrate birthdays or Christmas. His father, Joseph, didn’t share his wife’s Christian beliefs and he poured all his energy, and all his wages from the local steel-mill, into his talented sons. He was a failed bluesman whose band, the Falcons, never got a break so he transferred his ambitions to the Jackson Five.
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