Scribe Lynn Nottage on the 'Delicious Challenge' of Bringing Michael Jackson to Broadway With MJ

From the steel factory workers of Sweat to the lonesome lingerie seamstress at the center of Intimate Apparel, playwright Lynn Nottage has a gift for sussing out a universal humanity in her subjects. While working on the book for the Broadway blockbuster MJ, Nottage sought to find the heart behind one of pop culture’s great enigmas, Michael Jackson. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning scribe talked to Broadway.com about the enduring appeal of Jackson’s showmanship, her research process and the importance of leading with empathy. She also teased her next project, a stage adaptation of Imitation of Life, featuring original music by John Legend, which will open off-Broadway this fall.

What was your relationship to Michael Jackson’s music and public persona before taking on MJ?
My interest in music really tracks with the professional journey of Michael Jackson. I think that one of the very first albums that I ever owned and listened to as a child was ABC. Off the Wall was an incredibly pivotal album for me when I was in high school. And then when I was in college, Thriller became the album that I listened to on the weekends and danced to. In terms of my formative years, Michael Jackson was ever-present in my musical landscape.

You’ve previously explored cultural figures in plays like By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, which riffed on the careers of Theresa Harris and Hattie McDaniel. How did you approach MJ as a biographical project?
I think that there's an incredible responsibility when you're telling the story of such an iconic figure like Michael Jackson. He’s someone who has not just a national fan base, but a huge international fan base. There are people who know every single bit of information about his life. So, when you're sitting down to tell your story, there’s all this weight that's on your shoulders. You want to get it right because there are fans who are so deeply invested in his story. It was frightening, but it was also a delicious challenge.

What did the research process look like? Was it reading books? Watching archival footage? Interviewing family members or colleagues?
The answer to that question is yes, yes and yes. I read just about every book that was written about Michael Jackson. I looked at every single film and video that he made. I listened to every single track that he recorded, some which were unreleased. I spoke to people who had intimate relationships with him. One of the things that I'm particularly proud of is that a lot of folks who've come to see the show who knew Michael Jackson say that when they see the character on the stage, he's the Michael that they knew. He seems very familiar to them. I feel like that's just based on the research that I did and how in-depth I got into exploring the nature of who he was. I will also add that a lot of what's on stage is verbatim. A lot of the lines come directly from Michael Jackson's mouth—things that he either said in interviews or in writing. I felt it was really important that the character sound like Michael.

What was the day-to-day process of working on MJ?
I mean, musicals are made differently than plays. Thankfully there isn't as much solitary time because it's really built by a team of people, and I felt very blessed to have a wonderful team that included [director-choreographer] Christopher Wheeldon, [music supervisor/orchestrator] David Holcenberg and [associate director] Dontee Kiehn. We spent a lot of time in conversation trying to figure out, ‘Well, what do we want this to be?’ I think that the end result is as fluid as it is because it was really a conversation between all the departments.

Earlier this year, the Michael Jackson biopic Michael was released. Why do you think Michael Jackson continues to fascinate the public?
You can't separate the music from the man. The music is so brilliant and evergreen, and it speaks across generations and cultures. I also think that he was a brilliant showman. He really transformed the industry—number one, with the kind of videos that he made, which were visually forward and infused with lots of movement and had story arcs. Then you think about the stage shows that he produced, and that's one of the reasons that we chose to focus on one of the concerts. He really understood how to produce a spectacular arena show, and how to incorporate music, dance and visual elements in a way that felt seamless and dynamic and exciting. That is one of the things that continues to attract people to Michael.

In that vein, why did you choose to frame the musical with the Dangerous World Tour?
I was always interested in highlighting Michael's process as a musician because I think that there's so much information about every other aspect of his life. What people really don't know is how he put the pieces together. I felt like there would be a real hunger to understand something about his process and look behind the curtain. That’s why we decided to focus on the Dangerous tour, because it is such a seminal moment in his musical career. He was at the height of his musical powers. It was an incredibly ambitious undertaking, and that's why we micro-focused there. When you're writing, you're thinking about how do I best tell the story of someone like Michael Jackson? What is the aspect of him we want to capture? I think that we very quickly landed on the Dangerous tour.

Michael Jackson’s life has been examined from so many angles. How did you decide what to include and not include in MJ?
I think once we honed in on telling the story of just two days in his life and looking back at the aspects of his background that inspired the making of that concert and the making of his music, it became really easy to decide how to fill in the details of his life. We also understood that for someone who's as complicated as Michael Jackson, there will be many different people who will tell his story and there'll be many different ways in which the story will be told and we really specifically wanted to focus on him as a song-and-dance man. That is something that we landed on very early just in the development. It's like, how do we showcase what makes Michael special? And what makes him special is the fact that he was a brilliant showman and he was able to incorporate all of these elements seamlessly in ways that other musicians have not.

How did your understanding of Michael Jackson change over the course of writing MJ?
One of the things that I took away from working on this project is how disciplined Michael was as an artist and how important it was for him to be in conversation with other artists and other forms of music and dance. He was incredibly intentional in everything that he did, including some of his wackiness. He was someone who was very clear about what he wanted to communicate through his music. It was important to him that the end product feel crafted and considered and inhabited in a very intentional way. I think that’s something I didn't understand quite as acutely as I did until I had to dive deeper into his life.

Your next project is a musical adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s novel, Imitation of Life, featuring music and lyrics by John Legend. I’m familiar with the material through the Douglas Sirk version from the late ‘50s, which was itself a remake of a 1934 film. How are you approaching this iteration of the story?
What makes this iteration of Imitation of Life different is that it's going to be filtered through the sensibility of a Black woman. With a character like Delilah—though she's much beloved in all three versions of the story—I feel that there is a lack of understanding of who she was as a Black woman at that time. In our Imitation of Life, you're going to get a three-dimensional Delilah and Peola. They're not going to be adornments or accoutrement to the other storytelling. They're going to be given space to live and breathe in three dimensions.

The version I'm familiar with is characterized as a melodrama. Are you tapping into that genre at all?
I mean, I love a good melodrama and I certainly would recommend that people bring their tears. Fundamentally, Imitation of Life is the story of two single women who are trying to live the American dream and to climb that ladder only to discover that there are consequences and that things get sacrificed. So embedded in that storytelling is a little bit of melodrama. It's going to be beautiful. We're excited.

Something you’ve spoken about when discussing your work is maintaining empathy for your subjects. Was this something you were thinking about when working on MJ?
I think that whenever you're writing you can't fully inhabit the character unless you sustain the complexity of who they are. Part of that is finding what about them you empathize with. I think that empathy is a really important tool in how you approach storytelling. It's like understanding fully who those characters are and what makes them tick and also what their foibles are and what their flaws are. That was certainly true when I was exploring Michael Jackson. I knew the man that he presented to the world but one of the things that we were really interested in while we were working on this is allowing people to get to know the Michael who was behind all the glitter and the gloss. We wanted to explore who he was when took off the mask, so to speak.

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