E4 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022thing now if you’ll just bear with
me,’ ” Nottage recalls.
Then Wheeldon showed them
how they should surround Frost’s
Jackson — “so he’s circled by all the
people in his life who question
him, and it’s like this hive around
him, and then he goes into this
bone-chilling scream, and goes
back into the dance,” Nottage says.
“Watching him build that was
really revelatory. He did it in re-
sponse to wanting to capture what
Michael was feeling. It couldn’t be
a traditional number. It had to be
much more expressionistic. We all
just broke into applause.”For some observers, though,
the greatest act of creativity
in the show may be the story
itself, which stops short of the
alleged abuses that still cloud
Jackson’s legacy. How does Wheel-
don feel about the absences?
“Lynn and I felt we needed to
look at this as making a piece of
entertainment first and foremost,”
Wheeldon says. “Our work as art-
ists is to make something that’s
honest but also entertaining, that
has a point of view without being
in any way judgmental, and makes
space for the points of view of the
individual audience members. We
worked hard to create a work that
gives everyone space to bring in
their own feelings about Michael,
and not in any way be judgmen-
tal.”
Members of the Jackson estate
came to rehearsals at the begin-
ning, he says. They also attended a
studio run at the end of the re-
hearsal process and gave the cre-
ative team notes. “There was an
assumed suggestion that they
were on us all the time and dictat-
ing what we did, but that wasn’t
the case,” Wheeldon says. “We
ended up telling the story we
wanted to tell. We were not told
what we had to do.”
The estate, he says, wanted to
show “a meteoric rise through the
creation of the ‘Thriller’ album.
And they wanted balance. They
were fine with us dealing with
some of the harder truths, as long
as it was balanced with showing
the brilliance of Michael’s creative
process.”
Wheeldon acknowledges that
building the show solely around
Jackson’s art and some of the cir-
cumstances surrounding it “is a
choice we made that’s not neces-
sarily going to make everyone
happy.”
“These are conversations we’ve
had about great artists in the past,”
he adds, “and that we will have
about artists in the future — about
the legacies that are left behind by
complex artists.”
And in the end, he says, Jack-
son’s body of work will endure,
and it will demand interpretation.
“He’s left behind a legacy that is
not going away,” Wheeldon says.
“Wherever you land on Michael,
the art is going to live.”sequence, and you realize he is
attacking each pose with infinite
amounts of precision.
“I was just in awe of the articu-
lation in his body,” Wheeldon con-
tinues. “The ability to seemingly
isolate every bone, every muscle,
and to be so full of attack in those
isolations, and then below, be like
mercury in his legs. Seamlessly
shape shifting.”
Jackson’s moonwalk, for exam-
ple, “reminds me of a ballerina
with a brilliant bourrée,” he says.
When beautifully done, this string
of quick, tiny, blurred steps is so
smooth, the dancer seems to float
atop her legs. You can’t see where
the motion comes from. As in a
moonwalk, “it only happens if they
can hold the top of their legs to-
gether in a lock, and have enough
release in the knees to have the
feet behave like liquid,” Wheeldon
says. “You can’t quite believe the
human body can do that.”
As he and Nottage worked on
the script, Wheeldon covered a
mirror in his living room with
colored Post-it notes scribbled
with song titles. He moved them
around as his ideas on how to link
them evolved.
“I just sat back and watched in
wonder as he worked out a move-
ment vocabulary to tell the story,”
Nottage says. Wheeldon could im-
provise in the moment when they
got stuck, which is what happened
during an initial attempt to stage
the “Bad” number in the second
act.
“He said to the dancers and
singers, ‘I’m going to do some-tionally but quite possibly mixed
in some traces.There aren’t many dance se-
quences in “MJ” that are
wholly Michael Jackson’s.
The “Billie Jean” number is close
to Jackson’s solo spot on the Mo-
town 25 television special in 1983,
when viewers gaped at his moon-
walk and then lost their minds.
The show’s epic “Thriller” number
has red jackets and monsters, but
it veers sharply from Jackson’s
original. The monsters are subtly
costumed as various versions of
Jackson, as if he’s being devoured
by his past personas. It includes
almost zero Michael language,
Wheeldon says.
“Doing our version of ‘Thriller’
versus Michael’s version was al-
ways a difficult one to encourage
the estate to go along with,”
Wheeldon says. “But what they
appreciated in the end is that we
could take a Michael song and
successfully place it in the narra-
tive we were building, and also
deliver a sense of joy and spectacle
for the audience. We could do
both, in fact.”
Ultimately, Wheeldon pre-
served what most astonished his
practiced eye: Jackson’s unique
clarity of movement.
“He danced with this superhu-
man speed and precision and at-
tack, which ballet dancers certain-
ly can understand,” the choreogra-
pher says. “But what you don’t
necessarily connect with the danc-
ing of a pop star is that you can
pause him anywhere through aories, Wheeldon began building a
new vision of Jackson’s artistry.
Wheeldon took a similarly ex-
pansive, interpretive approach in
2015, when he directed and cho-
reographed the Broadway musical
“An American in Paris,” based on
the 1951 movie with Gene Kelly
and Leslie Caron. (Wheeldon won
a best choreography Tony for his
work.) That production helped
him land the “MJ” job, after the
Jackson estate saw it.
“They felt Michael would have
really liked it,” Wheeldon says,
“the way it moved, and the way I’d
taken these iconic artists and not
tried to re-create them.”
Nottage says she and Wheeldon
endeavored to tell Jackson’s story
“not only in a traditional way, but
through how he uses his body.” She
was inspired by a line that Jackson
scribbled in a notebook: “I like to
think while I dance. I process my
ideas through my body.”
Frost’s Jackson voices this early
in the show, to the MTV reporter
(Whitney Bashor) who’s recording
his rehearsals, and whose inter-
view with him unleashes memo-
ries of singing as a youngster in the
Jackson 5, and suffering an abu-
sive father. There’s scant mention
of Janet Jackson, though — you’d
never know Michael had a famous
little sister, who, according to her
recent docuseries, was always un-
derfoot in their early years. But
you wouldn’t be wrong if you sus-
pected that a few of the show’s
moments are Janet-inspired —
Wheeldon watched a great deal of
her work, he says, and uninten-line rush of a show” and “a dance
musical of the first rank.”
From the start of his three-year
collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-
winning playwright Lynn Not-
tage, who wrote the show’s book,
Wheeldon knew he wanted to lead
with the dancing. But he wasn’t
going to take a paint-by-numbers
approach and merely reproduce
Jackson’s music videos, with a
crotch grab here and swiveling
ankles there. Wheeldon isn’t that
kind of choreographer. None of
the big names are; there’s no cre-
ative challenge in it. Justin Peck,
for example, didn’t duplicate Je-
rome Robbins’s original dances
when he worked on Steven Spiel-
berg’s recent film version of “West
Side Story.” Peck used Robbins as
inspiration for a fresh approach.
But to riff on Jackson’s famously
eye-popping moves, to build varia-
tions on his themes of anxiety and
defiance, and to free the pop star’s
physical expressiveness from the
three-minute song frame, Wheel-
don had to start somewhere, and
his customary starting point is
himself.
“I’m so used to fully realizing
movement through my own body,”
he says, “but I don’t have that with
Michael.”T
he British-born Wheeldon,
48, has been a Jackson fan
since his teenage years,
when the poster of 1987’s “Bad”
album hung in his dorm room at
White Lodge, the London resi-
dence for Royal Ballet School stu-
dents. Yet neither his admiration
nor his magnificent dance experi-
ence — with the Royal Ballet and
New York City Ballet, performing
works by all the greats, including
Robbins, George Balanchine and
others, and choreographing bal-
lets in opera houses around the
world — t old him how it felt to
move like Jackson.
This, Wheeldon says, was the
most difficult part of his work on
“MJ.” “I’ve never had that experi-
ence before,” he says.
“So much is in intention and
attitude and not just shape,” he
adds. “I can make the shape, but
what is the intention and the atti-
tude behind that? The people who
worked with Michael and danced
with him understand that.”
So Wheeldon rounded up a
team of experts. “You have to set
your ego aside and understand
that there are people who know
this world far better than you do,”
he says. “People who are moving
Michael encyclopedias.”
He brought in Rich and Tone
Talauega, brothers who had
danced and choreographed with
Jackson on tour and in his videos,
and he leaned on the show’s asso-
ciate choreographer, Michael
Balderrama, a Broadway veteran
who’d also danced with Jackson.
Equipped with their muscle mem-WHEELDON FROM E1A freshtake ona popstar’smovesPHOTOS BY MATTHEW MURPHYdanceABOVE: “We worked
hard to create a work
that gives everyone space
to bring in their own
feelings about Michael,”
director Christopher
Wheeldon says.
BELOW: Michael
Jackson is portrayed
with rubbery finesse in
“MJ” b y Myles Frost.