Let There Be Michael

Pop's Prophet Returns. Was the End Near? No Way.

Michael Jackson and two of his brothers at Friday's seemingly endless concert in New York. (Reuters)

NEW YORK

So, you expected normal? You figured that Michael Jackson -- the man-boy recluse with the oxygen tents and the pet llamas and the wacky family and the five U-Hauls' worth of exotic psychological baggage -- would come up with a conventional comeback show? You figured the guy would just sing, dance and moonwalk for a few hours? Out of the question. And on Friday night at Madison Square Garden, where Jackson and his five brothers performed the first of two shows, the harbinger of all the forthcoming weirdness arrived a mere five minutes into the program.

That's when the darkened stage was lit to reveal Marlon Brando, sitting in silence on a leather chair, wearing dark glasses and a suit and fiddling with his watch, apparently oblivious to some 20,000 fans. When the actor finally spoke, he delivered a grumpy, half-comprehensible lecture about the "hundreds, if not thousands of children" being starved and hacked to death in some foreign land. Michael Jackson, he gravely intoned, is one of the few souls out there trying to help.

It was a harangue that might merely have seemed inappropriately timed if it were audible. All cheer in the room vanished, replaced first by startled quiet, followed shortly by anger and a hail of boos. "Stella!" hooted a wag.

This bizarre downer of a cameo captured the inexplicably amateurish spirit of the event, a graceless and paceless four-hour marathon of music and awkward silence formally known as the Michael Jackson 30th Anniversary Celebration. Conceived as a reunion for the Jackson brothers and a re-coronation for the King of Pop, the evening felt more like a meandering dress rehearsal than a finished product, more like a rough draft than an extravaganza that could justify the $2,500 fetched for top tickets. There are consumer hot lines for lesser fleecings.

A pileup of performers and other celebrities -- including Ray Charles, R&B singer Usher and Liza Minnelli -- seemed as perplexed as the crowd. The umpteen-piece band, which was stationed on a second-story riser toward the rear of the stage, appeared to run out of filler music to smooth over the lengthy downtime between acts, leaving the catcalls and jeers of an increasingly surly audience to fill the void.

Just as bad, the vocals for nearly every performer were buried. When actor Samuel L. Jackson strode onstage to open the ceremonies, his speech sounded something like "Mmmph mammphy mmph Hall of Fame. Mmmmpha ma mummphy millions and millions. Mmph mammphy and need I mention 'Thriller?' " Dionne Warwick's microphone simply wasn't working during one of the two verses she showed up to sing.

Only the Jacksons themselves -- who sang hits like "I Want You Back" and "ABC" before surrendering the stage to Michael, who soloed for the exceptional final 45 minutes of the night -- rescued the experience from outright calamity. Unfortunately, the Jacksons didn't take the stage until 10:45, more than three hours after the scheduled start of the show. Even when Michael finally got around to hits like "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" he kept squandering his momentum by taking breaks. His voice and dance skills are undiminished, but either his stamina or his sense of showbiz timing is gone.

Most of the evening was given over to an uneven batch of vocal tributes by a series of guest stars, while Michael sat like a Roman emperor in a lit booth near the side of the stage and air-kissed the performers. And there were plenty of between-songs video montages, each of which extolled a one-gloved global superstar and all-around genius. The tone of these films was creepily unctuous and oddly defensive.

"Michael Jackson is a man of integrity, sensitivity and a true humanitarian," we learned from the voice-over. "Where does his magic come from?"

What is he, Zeus? The real question isn't the origins of Jackson's magic but whether he still has it at age 43, and whether he'll command a huge audience for the October release of "Invincible," his first offering in years. Lately, Jackson's music and legacy have been overshadowed by a much-publicized child molestation accusation, as well as a disastrous addiction to plastic surgery. To a lot of the record-buying kids too young to remember "Thriller," the guy is an irrelevant wacko with a Play-Doh face.

"My friends can't stand him," said Tiffany Liu, a University of Pennsylvania student milling in the preshow crowd outside the Garden. "They think I'm weird."

Jackson's strategy for the night was fittingly strange. Ramping up the celebrity voltage, he surrounded himself with as many famous people as possible, as if to say, "If I'm so bad, how come these people love me?" Among the luminaries slated to sit in the audience were Sally Jessy Raphael and the cast of "Everybody Loves Raymond," as well as William Shatner and "Baywatch" star David Hasselhoff. (Jackson sat flanked by Elizabeth Taylor and Macaulay Culkin.)

A saner man would have low-balled expectations, kept ticket prices low and ditched the innocence-by-association concept altogether. For one thing, that might have assured a sellout -- there turned out to be plenty of unfilled seats and a bustling buyer's market outside the venue. For another, it would have spared Jackson some embarrassment when a few of the scheduled stars, apparently sniffing disaster, withdrew from the event.Alicia Keys, for instance, told the media at the MTV Video Awards, the night before Friday's show, that she was bailing.

But little about this evening made much sense. It began, promisingly enough, with Usher, R&B star Mya and a frighteningly emaciated Whitney Houston doing a version of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'." Once Brando had cleared out, country pipsqueak Billy Gilman got his young tonsils around "Ben," Jackson's ode to a rodent and his first solo No. 1 hit. Slow songs and ballads, for some reason, were heavily emphasized. Latin crooner Marc Anthony handled an overwrought rendering of "She's Out of My Life," while Minnelli -- who seems to have altered the very shape of her head, rather than just her features, through plastic surgery -- made a three-course meal out of "You Are Not Alone." Some of these performances were lively and striking -- the two numbers by Destiny's Child, for instance, proved just how great a debt teen pop owes the Jacksons. But the random guest-star parade merely gave the first segment of the night the bloated, haphazard feel of an awards show.

Finally, the video screens advised everyone to "Brace Yourself," which meant that the Jacksons, at last, were upon us. Five brothers -- Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, Jackie and the youngest, Randy, who wasn't a member of the Jackson 5 -- came strutting onstage through five compartments set up to look like dressing rooms. Michael rose slowly from beneath the stage, wearing a white leather cosmonaut suit with gold shin pads and a motorcycle helmet. They opened with "Can U Feel It?," which finally roused this crowd to the fervor it had been denied for hours. "I'll Be There" turned the Garden into a thicket of slowly waving hands, and "I Want You Back" had the audience bouncing hard enough to shake the video screens suspended above the stage. 'N Sync -- when, oh, when will there be a major show without these glory-starved scamps? -- pitched in on "Dancing Machine." Given how much 'N Sync has lifted from the Jacksons, it seemed the least the boys could do.

The brothers, who have been feuding in various permutations for years, moved and harmonized smoothly, though they barely interacted; a half-kidding "don't interrupt me" is about all that Michael said to any of them.

A half-hour after it started, the Jacksons' segment was over and, after yet another long break, this was Michael's show. He dueted with Britney Spears, feigning interest in her while she feigned indifference to him on "The Way You Make Me Feel." He then emerged with a tiny suitcase, which he methodically opened, removing his "Thriller"-era outfit, including his black hat and lone, spangled glove. For "Beat It," a group of dancers dressed as rival gangs reprised the "fight" scene from the video, arranging themselves in that human pyramid formation that is one of Jackson's lasting contributions to choreography.

"I love YOU!" he shouted, over and over. "I love YOU!" the crowd shouted back. Jackson shared little else, aside from urging the crowd to get a look at a fan's banner that read "Burn All Tabloids" on one side and "King of Pop" on the other.

For the inevitable "We Are the World," which ended the show, producer Quincy Jones assembled the night's stars, as well as people who participated in the original, like Kenny Rogers. And then the show petered out into farewell hugs by the 40 or so singers onstage, a bit like the end of each episode of "Saturday Night Live." That seemed fitting because much of the night felt more targeted to a television audience than the in-house crowd, perhaps because it was filmed for a CBS special to be broadcast in November. That might explain all the downtime, though how anyone could charge a few grand for a seat and then pepper a show with TV timeouts is beyond imagination.

There was a superb 90-minute concert buried somewhere in this heap, under all the aggrandizing testimonials and semi-pointless musical excursions. If Jackson really wants to reconnect with fans, he ought to stick with what won them over in the first place: his singing and spectacularly fleet dancing. Nobody is going to love him because the Godfather and Elizabeth Taylor think he's a stand-up guy.