In the years before Michael Jackson died, he lived like a man starring in his own posthumous show.
Always with the paintings, the statues, the relentless self-references. Always larger than life.
5 out of 5 stars
Following his death, Cirque du Soleil teamed up with his estate and faced a mammoth task. How can any group take Jackson's music and create a posthumous legacy piece for a man who, while he still walked among us, drew his own silhouette so garishly large?
You would imagine the result would be massive, magnificent and thoroughly unsubtle, but not in your wildest dreams would you imagine anything quite like this.
Here is what $60 million -- the approximate cost of Cirque du Soleil’s Michael Jackson the Immortal World Tour -- will buy you: a dozen musicians, 40 trucks to cart all your stuff and a troupe of around 65 acrobats, dancers and contortionists tumbling across a stage pulled from some acid-trip dreamscape.
With a tip of the esthetic hat to the originator, of course.
On Wednesday, the Michael Jackson the Immortal World Tour opened the first of two nights at the MTS Centre, making the 'Peg only the seventh stop on its two-year arena tour. At first, the show began like most Cirque adventures do, with a little bit o' clowning -- for this show, provided by a troupe of slick-dancing Michael Jackson "Fanatics" bedecked in his iconic attire.
Then the screen dropped, the pyro exploded, and we weren’t at the circus anymore.
Instead, we were thrown into the middle of an immense and ever-shifting explosion of scenery and lurid props and plunging bodies. Video screens rose and split from nowhere, flashing truncated snippets of Jackson, his visage at times seemingly suspended in space.
And then there really were people suspended in space, but they were acrobats and used to it. More on that in a moment, but know this is not a typical Cirque du Soleil show. It’s more vast; it’s also more a shockingly ambitious concert experience than a circus one.
There is less daring jammed into the eye-popping 150-minute extravaganza, but more dancing; less acrobatics, but more all-out eye candy. Sometimes, it was all a lurid fever dream -- the early (and literal) Dancing Machine scene found the acrobats turned into iron men, cavorting in the guts of some steamy, greasy metalshop.
Other times, it was a delicate fantasy, as when acrobats in LED-spangled bodysuits soared through the darkness to the wispy sounds of Human Nature, their limbs clinging to and unwrapping from aerial hoops -- rippling human constellations in an otherwise pitch-black room.
That part was sort of magical.
But the rest, lest anyone had forgotten, was very Michael. Sometimes, his disembodied voice echoed through the arena, speaking of his inspiration or vision or hurts; it was an eerie experience, especially considering how faithful some of the reworkings of his esthetic were.
The showpiece Thriller, for instance, was billed as a parkour acrobatic piece, but came across more as a fairly faithful reimagining of that iconic music video with ghostly dancers flipping through a stage that somehow, when we weren’t looking, had been transformed from a gangster hideout to a graveyard.
But those iconic images are why Michael Jackson’s fans loved him. They are treated reverently here, as are the words and features of Jackson himself: The show unapologetically honours the larger-than-life silhouette the King of Pop created.
Want to check it out for yourself? There are still tickets left at Ticketmaster ($50 to $175) for tonight's encore performance at the MTS Centre.
melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/br...-big-a-show-as-Michael-Jackson-132670968.html
I'm not happy with myself not going.:angry: I have misery and jealousy that I can't help.
