Chris Eldon Lee reviews “Thriller Live” which is at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre until Saturday 25th February.
When it’s the evil, maniacal voice of Vincent Price telling you to turn off your mobile phone before the show starts, you tend to do as you’re told. You also tend to spend much of the evening on your feet…boogying fit to bust.
You know exactly what you’re going to get when you see ‘Thriller’; wall to wall Jackson hits, with just a modicum of spoken eulogy to remind you how great he and his brothers were. ‘Thriller’ was the number 1 album for 37 weeks. Michael won 13 Grammys. That kind of thing.
So how can such a show fail? It can’t, of course; especially when it’s done as well as this. It’s completely manufactured and deeply manipulative. But it’s also devotedly authentic. All of which is precisely what its audience wants.
With an excellent band behind them, no fewer than four superb lead vocalists share the songs…including soprano Ria Horsford, who handles the higher register numbers. Her delivery of ‘I’ll be There’ is exquisite. Mohican Rory Taylor exudes genuine pathos in ‘She’s Out Of My Life’. Tall, suited, Brit Quentin excels at the soft rock end of the spectrum. Sean Christopher, with dangling dreadlocks, majors on the songs from the trilby hat period. And all four combine hauntingly on ‘Earth Song’. It’s a real show stopper. But don’t worry, there’s a stomping twenty-minute encore still to come.
Twenty minutes in from the start of the show, however, I was having my doubts. Not all the Jackson material is equally memorable and the producers could have been more calculating about what to leave out. There’s that middle part of Michael’s recording career that doesn’t bear too much scrutiny; which led to an infamous Tony Blackburn joke: “Why did Michael Jackson title his seventh album ‘Bad’? Because he couldn’t spell ‘Atrocious’.” It’s a pity that so many of the early Jackson Five hits are abridged in favour of his lesser, solo work.
I was also bothered by the limp, low-energy, dance routines to songs like ‘ABC’ and ‘I Want You Back’. But then it dawned on me that the director Gary Lloyd was indeed aiming for authenticity. That’s exactly how lame the Jacksons’ early choreography was; cosy, approximate and dancing with one arm (because the other arm was holding the microphone). The disco revolution came with Quincy Jones’ production of ‘Off The Wall’…done here as a sort of homage to ‘The Village People’.
The stellar surprises stack up. There’s a cheeky dig at classical Egyptian dance in ‘Remember the Time’ and a sensual, surrealistic routine to ‘Dirty Diana’, during which the lead guitarist is urged on stage to deliver his devastating riff. And to see not just one man, but the entire male chorus, moon dancing in unison is an eye-widening experience. All these years, and I still don’t know how it’s done.
Even the ‘cheese’ was ripe. I loved the period detail; the dated, dotted, video technology, the air guitars, the hopelessly unattractive Pan’s People outfits. And when the zombies finally drag themselves on, they are as deliciously kitsch as a bag of rag dolls.
We were robbed of Michael Jackson’s talent eight years ago this summer. We’ll never know what more might have flowed from his well of genius. But this show is a perfect celebration of the brilliance he bequeathed us.
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