Photo credit: Alex Walzak
The Milwaukee artists on stage Friday night for Turner Hall Ballroom’s MJ Uncovered show had their work cut out for them. The Uncovered series has tackled plenty of musical giants before, but never an icon quite as towering as Michael Jackson, the gold standard of pop stardom, an artist whose commercial, artistic and cultural reach may never be replicated.
Understanding that no performer could fill his shoes, the night’s curator, B~Free, wisely didn’t try. Rather than anointing herself the primary Jackson surrogate for the night, the Milwaukee soul savant made the show even more of a group effort than the typical Uncovered program, recruiting a stable of singers, musicians and dancers, who all carried the weight more or less equally. That decentralized approach flattered everybody. While there wasn’t a single artist who rivaled MJ’s legendary magnetism, the scope of the collective talent on stage was staggering.
As is often the case with these programs, the night’s biggest gambits tended to pay off the most, especially an absolutely sizzling instrumental take on “Smooth Criminal,” reworked for strings and flute by B~Free, SistaStrings and Evan Lane. Jesse Weinberg and Brian Dimetri’s Caribbean-accented reading of “The Girl is Mine” radiated sunshine and joy, while the electro-soul duo Immortal Girlfriend let the show’s impressive house band—featuring ace players from the city’s VoodooHoney collective—take a break while the two presented their minimalist, beat-heavy update of “Stranger in Moscow.”
Largely uninterested in exploring the mythos of Jackson (his celebrity or his demons), the program simply focused on the music, dividing his songbook into three categories: his dance songs, his love songs and his social-awareness songs. That final stretch was most illuminating. Jackson was never best known as a political artist, but he genuinely believed he had a responsibility to use his platform for good. And while he’s better remembered for entirely uncontroversial softballs like “Earth Song” (eloquently sung by Cree Myles) and “Black and White,” a song whose post-racial idealism feels haplessly off message in 2018 (it didn’t make the setlist), just as often he wrote with real passion. The night’s great revelation was a chest-pounding group performance of “They Don’t Care About Us,” a spot-on Black Lives Matter anthem that resonates even more today than it did 20 years ago. The common knock against Jackson’s final albums is that his personal troubles soured his songwriting, which grew ever more vindictive and paranoid, but “They Don’t Care About Us” was a reminder of how potent his anger could be when he aimed it somewhere aside from the tabloid press.
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The night’s setlist left off a number of big hits—“Thriller,” ‘Bad,” “Billie Jean” and “Man in the Mirror” among them—but it didn’t matter. B~Free and her crew had a gift for milking electric performances out of even Jackson’s second-tier songs. They were helped in that regard by the more than half dozen that periodically flew onto to the stage, always to enormous cheers from the enthused audience. The best-choreographed Uncovered production yet, the night may have been first and foremost about the music, but it didn’t skimp on the showmanship, either.
