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It is hard for me to convey how much I loved Michael Jackson when I was 12 years old.
A friend of the family bought me the Thriller LP (along with Def Leppard’s Pyromania, which failed to captivate me in the same way) and I pored over that gatefold vinyl like it was my job.
I adored all the songs, from P.Y.T. to Human Nature. The night the full-length Thriller video was set to debut was grounds for a sleepover dance party. (If pressed, I could probably perform that graveyard zombie dance right now.)
My bedroom and locker were plastered with photos carefully torn from teen magazines, Michael smiling down at me in his canary-yellow vest and matching bow tie or his iconic leather jacket.
Over the years, my passion dwindled, the pinup photos of MJ and his glittery glove replaced by the Police and R.E.M.
But you never forget your first love, and on opening night of MJ the Musical at the Centennial Concert Hall, when Jordan Markus as Jackson stepped into a white spotlight and started performing Beat It, I wasn’t prepared for the tears that immediately pricked my eyes.
As Holly Harris says in her review of the show, Markus is such a doppelganger for the late singer, it’s like seeing a posthumous performance; Brandon Lee Harris as younger Jackson, while less physically similar, has the vocal mannerisms and the gloriously loose limbs down pat.
Jordan Markus’s onstage moves as MJ are meticulously studied and flawlessly executed. (Matthew Murphy photo)
I never got to see Jackson live in his heyday, but his reputation has since been so tarnished that it feels a bit icky to enjoy his music. Even the rush of nostalgic joy this jukebox musical provides is tempered with a sense of unease.
MJ the Musical (perhaps too conveniently) is set in the run-up to the 1992 Dangerous tour, which was a year before the first allegations of child molestation against Jackson began to appear; the time frame allows the play to restrict its areas of controversy to MJ’s ever-lightning skin tone and his possession of Bubbles the chimpanzee.
However, a foreboding sense of what is to come hangs over the production like a bad smell.
The allegations have not stopped, even in the wake of Jackson’s death at age 50 in 2009 (on my birthday, which crushed the 12-year-old in me). It’s hard to rationalize the fact that Jackson’s estate will benefit from the proceeds of this musical — it is co-produced by two of the estate’s executors — as well as from an upcoming biopic, Michael.
But the power of music isn’t rational. On Wednesday night, when the stabbing beats of Thriller arrived and the concert hall stage was transformed via digital wizardry into a haunted landscape, I was suddenly 12 years old again, dancing in my basement.
For just a moment, it was pure magic.
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