MJ won four 2022 Tony Awards, including Best Actor in a Musical for Myles Frost and Best Choreography for Christopher Wheeldon, built around Michael Jackson's own catalogue and dance vocabulary.
As with most big Broadway musicals, checking for a digital lottery or day-of rush tickets is the standard way to find a better-priced seat.
The book is by Lynn Nottage, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the choice of framing device is hers: rather than a life story, the show sits inside rehearsals for the 1992 Dangerous World Tour, with a documentary crew asking questions the subject would rather not answer. Memory does the rest of the work. Three performers play Jackson at different ages, and they share the stage, so a rehearsal-room argument can be interrupted by the child who was made to do this first.
Christopher Wheeldon, who came to the show from ballet, directs and choreographs. His problem was that the audience already knows the choreography — every lean, spin and freeze is in general circulation — so the production treats it as repertory to be reconstructed rather than invented, and is explicit about where it came from: the Nicholas Brothers, Fred Astaire, Bob Fosse, the street styles Jackson absorbed and repackaged. Rich and Tone Talauega share the choreography credit.
It opened at the Neil Simon Theatre in February 2022 and won four Tony Awards from ten nominations: Myles Frost for Best Actor in a Musical, Wheeldon and the Talauegas for choreography, Natasha Katz for lighting and Gareth Owen for sound. Frost, who replaced the originally cast actor before opening, was in his early twenties and had not appeared on Broadway before.
The production is made with the cooperation of Jackson's estate, and that shapes what it will discuss. The allegations of child sexual abuse are absent from the evening; the show deals instead with the press, the debts and the painkillers, going far enough to acknowledge that something was wrong and stopping short of naming it. Reviewers said so at the time, more or less unanimously, and a visitor is better served knowing that going in than discovering it in the second act.
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MJ the Musical is a jukebox musical based on the life of the American entertainer Michael Jackson, focusing on his preparations for the 1992 Dangerous World Tour. It features Jackson's music, a book by Lynn Nottage, and direction and choreography by Christopher Wheeldon.
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