metaphortunate son (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
metaphortunate) wrote2012-01-19 10:00 pm
metaphortunate) wrote2012-01-19 10:00 pm
Entry tags:
two great tastes that eeeeeeech
"Michael Jackson, angered over persistent media reports that he has had extensive plastic surgery, strikes a People magazine reporter with one of his antenna stalks." - Dave Barry, 1988I don't think the Cirque de Soleil Michael Jackson show was deliberately subversive. I think it was an accident that the show was consistently as unsettling as possible. But the creators just constantly kept putting their finger on the uncomfortable spot. The central character is a mime in a white mask. Let me repeat that. It's a show about Michael Jackson. The central performer is a man in a white mask. I understand that Mr. Jackson wrote some damn good songs but you wouldn't know it from this show. You got half a minute of "Thriller" in a medley; but "Have You Seen My Childhood" got a long, surreally saccharine sequence with this whiteface mime dancing around the gates of Neverland. Yes, Michael. We have all seen your childhood because you had it on camera. Wasn't that the problem? Actually the theme running throughout nearly the whole show is fetishistically exaggerated childhood whimsy and it is creepy as fuck because the theme in the rest of the show is sexuality. The main performer for "Dangerous" is a pole dancer. There are acrobats who perform on poles: they don't do it in a string bikini and stripper heels, and they don't focus on poses like these. I have no problem with sex in my performance but I do have a problem with two things. One is sexism. I'd be all right with it if the men were also naked and flashing crotch but they're not. The cello player with the freshly waxed bikini line was a woman. The dancers wearing baggy clothes were men. The other problem I have is that again the show hit right in the uncanny valley: if you're doing a Michael Jackson show, can it really be by accident that half your show is about childhood and the other half is about fucking? When you play "Smooth Criminal" do you want to make sure your audience is thinking about the fact that it's quite possible that Mr. Jackson was in fact a criminal, and not the smooth glamorous kind, but a pathetic twisted horror?
As Mr. E said, the idea of Cirque's circus set to Michael Jackson's music is a pretty good one; unfortunately they did Michael Jackson's circus set to Cirque's music. Michael Jackson was a great singer and dancer. Their musical arrangements were not as good as the originals and their dancing was not as good as his. And most of the show was dancing. Like three times they did an actual circus act and just set it to an MJ song - the awesome contortionist, the great bouncy acrobats, a quite decent pair of aerialists - and you could tell because the audience clapped. The rest of the time we sort of sat there in a 15,000 person stunned silence. The Fabulous Stormtroopers of Love did a clunky-ass dance to "They Don't Care About Us" as the video screens showed a Montage of Speciously Political Sadness - starving kids in Africa, cops holding batons, protest signs, it turns out there are Bad Things in the World - and then their chest signs stopped glowing dollar signs at us and started glowing big red hearts as the screens showed quotes from Mr. Jackson about how it's really important to Dream and to Love and I don't know if on other nights the audience has been feeling it, but on the night we went, there was sort of an auditorium-wide feeling of "are you shitting me?"
Maybe they pulled it together at the end. I don't know, we left early to beat the rush. I used to think Cirque de Soleil was a guaranteed good time; that is clearly not true for every show.
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....the wha? Well, shows how out-of-the-loop I am.
The central character is a mime in a white mask. Let me repeat that. It's a show about Michael Jackson. The central performer is a man in a white mask
Ohhhhhh boy.
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That sounds a little bit on the nose.
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