Sign In

X

Immortal Beloved: The Michael Jackson Thing Is... Man...

A specter of Michael Jackson is haunting China. And delightfully so. Here's a bunch of spazzy sentences about MJ: The Immortal.
Last updated: 2015-11-09
That Cirque du Soleil Michael Jackson spectacle just finished the Beijing leg of its worldwide tour, and we got Morgan Short's two cents on the show before it winds it way down to Shanghai tomorrow. Tickets are mostly sold out, but we've still got some left for Friday's show here -- if a "constant and unyielding somersaulting between craziness and transcendence" is your kind of thing.

***

So I went and saw Cirque du Soleil's Michael Jackson: The Immortal a few days ago and I've been wrestling with an accurate analogy to encapsulate the show, which conveys the following feelings and emotions, and so, so much more: euphoria, elation, wonderment, jubilation, madness, rapture, lunacy, delirium, intoxication, absurdity, and exaltation.

Here's what I got: Imagine your mum competing in the finals for Olympic gold in synchronized swimming. And for some reason her entire team is comprised of the band Slayer. Just at the climax of her routine, when she is emerging from the water like swan through an undulating, paddling circle of Slayer members, Tony Hawk does a 720 kick flip over the entire length of the swimming pool and at that exact same moment, a thousand doves explode in the air, showering the attending nations of the world in diamonds and candy, the sky turns rainbow-colored, and Mr. T hands you a bowl of Lucky Charms.

…Okay, maybe that's too much but it something like that! It's so good! Blarg! Look at this!





















So the show is basically this: there's no real storyline per se. It's a series of cascading set pieces anchored around interpretations of Michael Jackson's hit songs. Song selection spans Jackson's entire oeuvre, but his main hits of the '80s, along with his later catalog of messianic ballads comprise the bulk of the selection. An international cast of dancers, musicians, singers, acrobats, and twirling people perform these massive and intricately-choreographed routines against a backdrop of shifting stage pieces and gazillion dollar LED screens in a two-part tour de redonk that is a constant and unyielding somersaulting between craziness and transcendence.

Bubbles is in it! BUBBLES.



One central character threads through the whole thing, dressed, of course, in a shimmering, shimmering track suit. This is him. I think he's either the spirit of Michael Jackson, a personification of the soul of the music, or the embodiment of the collective innocence of the children of the world. Something like that.


"Before you judge me, try to love me". - Michael Jackson.

And tons of other things are in it. Wrenching guitar solos, French Canadians spinning all up in your face, pole dancing, aerial tango, parkour, light shows, a giant, dancing, glittering glove, a gigantic baby Michael Jackson puppet, mime, tumbling, a one-legged dancer, Hitler (yeah), a contortionist, giant, gushing jets of steam, and the spectral, disembodied voice of Michael Jackson himself talking about love and hope and how war is lame and save the earth and be yourself.

The show has this filmic quality with set pieces taking huge swaths of inspiration from MJ's corpus of genre-fascinated music videos -- "Smooth Criminal" (gangster), "Beat It" (urban drama), "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" (romance), "Dangerous" (ummm... erotica?), and of course "THRILLER" (horror). Yes. Thriller.

It's all tilting towards the climax in the second act, which is the performance of "They Don’t Really Care About Us", which is the entire cast dressed like crypto-fascist Judge Dredd cyborgs marching up and down the stage whilst images of war, famine, rioting, human suffering, atomic bombs exploding, the KKK, and Hitler, Hitler, Hitler are flashed up on the screen. It's pretty full-on jaw-dropping.



And yeah. That's when this is supposed to have happened on opening night. I saw the Sunday show. It wasn't in there. So... um, yeah.

Anyways, TL;DR. If you're a fan of Cirque's brand of bombast or, more specifically, if you're a Michael Jackson fan, you're probably going to want to get down with this. It's a show primarily for MJ fans for sure. Pretty much the entire performance was punctuated with these pained and guttural moans from the audience of "Michael!, Michael!, Michael!", just choked with sadness and tearful jubilation. Damn.

During the intermission a few of the performers came out to interact with the crowd and initiate these Michael Jackson chants. Here's one of the performers about to teach a 10-year-old girl how to moonwalk. Cell phone pic. This is pretty much the exact moment when my brain exploded.



Speechless, man! Speechless! Heartwarming! I'm not made of stone. I'm not made of stone... I had a lil' tear up. I admit it. Michael! Michael!!#!!!@

All photos with this article are from Cirque. Except that last one. Merci beaucoup.

TELL EVERYONE