The Whitewashing of Michael Jackson’s Sins

‘W e love you Michael!” people were calling out from the audience while having a deliriously good time at MJ, the musical that would have us believe that the greatest controversies surrounding Michael Jackson concerned whether he slept in an oxygen tent or bought the remains of the Elephant Man.

Jackson died so abruptly and so young that his fans didn’t have the time to prepare for his passing, and the musical provides a kind of joyous catharsis. In the performance I saw, understudy Aramie Payton, (substituting for headliner Myles Frost), who played Michael as he rehearses for his 1992 Dangerous Tour, and Tavon Olds-Sample, who played the teen and young-adult Michaels, did an uncanny job recreating Jackson’s marvelous dance moves and his explosive energy. MJ thus honors what Jackson did onstage and in the studio, even as it ignores what he did to little boys.

As showbiz cynics pointed out when Jackson died, the Michael Jackson business had just solved its biggest problems, which were the eccentricity and spending habits of its central figure. Without Michael Jackson in the way, we can all have a wonderful time reveling in his artistry. “Thriller,” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin,” and “Smooth Criminal” all inspire knockout numbers staged by director/choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, and a recreation of a 1973 Soul Train performance reminds us that during the break in Dancing Machine, Jackson popularized the robot dance, electrifyingly brought back to life by Olds-Sample. None of the performers can sing as well as Michael, but they come close enough, given that they look and sound like the real thing. So MJ is a dazzling, jet-fueled party . . .

. . . in honor of a monstrous child molester. It’s surprising that, to write the show’s book, the estate approved a proper playwright, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage, instead of merely hiring the sort of hack who lashes together revues in Vegas. But Nottage has allowed herself to be steered, or corrupted, into writing what amounts to an extended press release. Jackson’s tragic nature is evident, but the show prefers to imagine that he was merely a misunderstood victim of vicious scrutiny. It’s the same line his handlers stuck with for as long as they could while he was alive, but it started to come apart in 1993 — conveniently, the year after MJ takes place. The show therefore invites, or allows, his fans to revert to 1992 thinking about Jackson, who at the time was seen as merely a harmless eccentric.

Repeating the legend rather than daring to dig deep, or even to dig shallow, the show presents a Michael who is mainly preoccupied with musical excellence, with raising $100 million for charity on his 1992 tour, and with triumphing over unfair smears. Once in a while, Michael will pop a painkiller, but that’s as close as the show comes to acknowledging that there was more to the man than his brilliant career. Reporters in the background say things like, “What about the recent allegations?” But no hint is ever given that the worst allegations turned out to be true.

Like Bill Cosby, Jackson was a generational talent who nevertheless committed heinous acts that should have led to his spending the bulk of his adult life in prison. Yet Cosby and Jackson’s legacies are heading in very different directions today. This month brought the debut of a superb new Showtime documentary that makes a serious effort to grapple with every angle of Cosby’s story. MJ is aimed at fans who simply refuse to believe the truth about Jackson or (even worse) understand the truth and simply don’t care. I suspect the bulk of his fans are in the latter camp; Jackson was so talented that lots of people would forgive him just about anything.

Personally, I’ll never forgive Jackson, but I still listen to his songs on the car radio, and it would be a shame to lose those sterling recordings. Watching MJ, we can applaud the brilliant songs and the Broadway performers who bring them to life without having to salute the child molester. Though Nottage’s book is poky and contrived, built around two documentarians who interview Michael while he’s rehearsing with his backup dancers for that colossal world tour, the musical interludes range from entertaining to spectacular. Jackson might have been the most awe-inspiring American dancer since Gene Kelly — and dancing wasn’t even what he was best known for. Recreating his steps and his vocals on dozens of hit songs, Wheeldon provides exactly the kind of euphoria a Broadway audience craves in a jukebox musical.

If you wish, you can cheer Jackson’s era-defining art and put the rest of him in a lockbox. I don’t feel great about that, but a case could be made that his heirs are entitled to separate the Smooth Criminal from the actual criminal and recreate only the best of Michael. Moreover, as time goes by, Jackson’s creations are likely to outlive the misdeeds. Does anyone care that Tolstoy and Dickens were horrible men? In the future, Jackson’s fans may dismiss (or even fail to be aware of) his crimes as easily as opera lovers overlook (or fail to be aware of) Richard Wagner’s antisemitism. MJ is a big bet that they already do.