Beat it! You almost can't ― until that elephant in the room rears its ugly head

THE best and worst thing about this exhilarating Michael Jackson musical is that it almost makes you forget the elephant in the room.

- Nick Curtis

We’re taken by Myles Frost’s spellbinding “MJ” on a hectic ride through the King of Pop’s backstory as he prepares for his Dangerous tour in 1992 — when he was a painkiller-addicted, chimp-befriending, nose-whittled oddball who had not yet been publicly accused of sexually abusing children.

If you can blind yourself to this moral sophistry, Christopher Wheeldon’s production is a superlatively directed and choreographed piece of absolute pizzaz. Beat It, Smooth Criminal, Thriller, Can You Feel It? — the hits from a stunning 43-year body of work keep on coming, accompanied with precision-drilled evocations of groundbreaking dance routines.