New York theater critics have given mixed reviews to MJ, the new jukebox musical about pop icon Michael Jackson. The creative team includes Lynn Nottage (book), Jason Michael Webb (music direction, orchestrations), David Holcenberg (music supervision, orchestrations), Christopher Wheeldon (direction, choreography), Derek McLane (sets), Natasha Katz (lights), Paul Tazewell (costumes), Gareth Owen (sound), Peter Nigrini (projections), Charles LaPointe (hair & wigs). The cast includes Myles Frost (Michael Jackson), Quentin Earl Darrington (Joe Jackson, Rob), Whitney Bashor (Rachel), Gabriel Ruiz (Alejandro), Antoine L. Smith (Berry Gordy, Nick), Joey Sorge (Dave), John Edwards (Jackie Jackson), Ayana George (Katherine Jackson), Apollo Levine (Quincy Jones, Tito Jackson), Tavon Olds-Sample (Michael), Lamont Walker II (Jermaine Jackson), and Zelig Williams (Marlon Jackson). Walter Russell III and Christian Wilson alternate as Little Michael, while Devin Trey Campbell plays Little Marlon.
Deadline (Greg Evans): If MJ can’t contain the shock of the new that turned his 1983 television performance into an era-defining moment, it is in no short supply of its own thrills. … The third-rail allegations of child molestation go unstated if not entirely ignored. The approach is, historically speaking, defendable: The events of MJ are set in 1992 … a year before the public accusations and police investigations. … MJ pushes hard and unceasingly to move beyond the just-good-enough nostalgia that can turn even second-rate jukebox productions into crowd pleasers. It succeeds: MJ is a wildly entertaining marvel … a visual spectacle that would have dazzled the King himself.
Hollywood Reporter (Lovia Gyarkye): Who was Michael Jackson? That question was difficult to answer when he was alive and is even more so now after his death. MJ, a remarkable Broadway musical, … deftly probes this weighty topic. … The musical takes audiences through Jackson’s life and catalog with impressive ease, expertly chronicling major milestones. … But times have changed, especially the public’s scrutiny of celebrity accounts, along with conversations around what constitutes abuse and its impact on mental health. MJ will undoubtedly introduce a new generation to the artist’s work, but I wonder if it will cast the same spell.
New York Stage Review (Elysa Gardner): Myles Frost … does not disappoint. It’s all there: the gleaming tenor, by turns shivery and siren-like, and piercing falsetto; the elastic limbs and feet, sliding as if on ice, jumping and jerking in bursts that seem at once frenetic and impeccably controlled. … MJ neither defends its subject from the most serious charges against him nor urges us to distinguish between the artist and his art. Like most jukebox fare, it’s at its most winning when song and dance are in progress. … Whatever price he paid, or toll he exacted on others, will no doubt continue to be a source of speculation. Let’s just hope it’s not in another musical.
New York Times (Jesse Green): Michael Jackson was such a magnet for strange stories that they nearly obliterated his gift. Yet in defensively brushing off the ones that don’t matter while pointedly ignoring the one that does, the new musical MJ … may be the strangest Michael Jackson story yet. Not all strangeness is bad, of course, and within the confines of the biographical jukebox genre, MJ … is actually pretty good — for a while. … In the second half, the pleasure that compensated for its inherent ickiness can no longer do the job. … Ultimately, the problem with MJ is not its ethical stance but the way that stance distorts its value as entertainment. … We cannot understand or accept the main character if he’s deliberately kept from us.
Theater Mania (Zachary Stewart): With so many wildly divergent angles from which to approach the story of the late King of Pop, it should shock no one that [MJ] … settled on the least contested: Michael Jackson’s music is irresistible, and it is best when performed before a live audience. … The story seems to spring naturally from the imagination of its subject, making MJ more artful (and therefore more watchable) than most musicals of its kind. Much credit should go to Nottage for that. Wheeldon uses Nottage’s script as a springboard for fast-paced and dynamic staging. … The result is the most impressive dancing on any Broadway stage. … It’s going to be a big fat hit.
Time Out (Adam Feldman): The authorized biomusical MJ wants very much to freeze Michael Jackson in 1992. … Expertly directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, MJ does about as well as possible within its careful brief. In and of itself, it is a deftly crafted jukebox nostalgia trip. … The music and the dancing are sensational. And isn’t that, the show suggests, really the point in the end? … By setting the musical in 1992, MJ sidesteps the need to have Jackson address the abuse issue even as it touches sympathetically on other personal problems. … I left the theater entertained, but not convinced I had really seen the man in the smoke and mirrors.
Variety (Naveen Kumar): [MJ] is not so much a biomusical as a high-shine and surface-skimming rehabilitation tour for its late subject, flattening rather than reckoning with his complex legacy. … MJ narrows in on a troubled time for the artist, apparently for the sake of depicting him as a victim of the tabloid press and presenting an oblique denial of unspecified wrongdoing. … It’s an uncomfortable deflection that keeps the character’s humanity at a forced remove and hollows out the story’s core. But maybe it’s the closest to portraiture we can expect of an idol worshiped for his ambiguity and artifice as much as his soul.