‘MJ’ Director & Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon Conjures Michael Jackson Through Movement – Deadline Tony Watch Q&A
deadline.comAs a child, Christopher Wheeldon was a ballet and musical theater kid, like as not listening to Tchaikovsky while his brothers had Michael Jackson’s Thriller on the turntable.
His idea of an afternoon’s art project was reimagining the Victorian toy theater his father had built him into a Starlight Express set for his little electric cars. “I was that kid,” he says with a laugh.But by the time Jackson had moved on to Bad in 1987, Wheeldon was ready to follow. “When I finally went to ballet boarding school, the Bad album was, kind of, my album.
Those were my teen years, and my friends and I obsessively watched the Bad video. As ballet students, I think probably we saw the link to West Side Story, and I was starting to learn about Jerome Robbins and who he was and what he meant to theater, and so at that time Michael was really quite present in my life.”As director and choreographer of MJ, the 10-time Tony-nominated musical about Michael Jackson and his music, Wheeldon would seem to have found the ideal subject matter for his teenage obsession.
MJ, with book by the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, is a most unusual entry in the jukebox musical game, less given to the narrative gerrymandering that sinks other shows, and cleverly enlightening audiences on the inner workings of an artistic mind that could rightly be called genius.Deadline spoke to Wheeldon about that process, about Jackson’s musical power and about the ever-present elephant in the rehearsal room – the allegations of child molestation levied against Jackson before and after his death.
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