MJ: The Musical: a dazzlingly well-executed Jacko jukebox musical – but the elephant in the room is very big indeed

“Can I ask you about the allegations?”, an MTV documentary-maker says to Michael Jackson during the final rehearsals for his Dangerous world tour. The ears prick up: is this finally the moment choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s dazzlingly executed musical tribute to the King of Pop addresses the elephant in the room?

But no, she means the rumours that he bleaches his skin and sleeps in an oxygen tent. One year later, Jackson would be accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy, but this Tony-garlanded Broadway juggernaut, which lands in London with a largely new British cast ahead of a world tour, stubbornly, and undoubtedly expediently, refuses to venture a day beyond the tour’s opening night on June 27, 1992.

Which is not to say that demons don’t stalk original cast member Myles Frost’s uncannily well incarnated Jackson in this superior jukebox musical, which – to the irresistible beat of Jackson’s biggest (and several much smaller) hits – fluently dramatises the way his psychologically damaging childhood consistently bore down on his inner life. As tensions over the tour’s mounting costs accelerate (at one point, Jackson insists on jet packs), Frost gives us a largely inscrutable star who seems to have absented himself both internally and physically from the reality of adulthood. His voice is a silvery, tremulous quiver, his body an incorporeal, asexual will-o’-the-wisp, his response to difficult questions is to pull out a toy water gun.

His creatively tyrannical manager father, Joseph, is played by the same actor (Ashley Zhangazha, excellent) who plays his affable tour director Rob. In a serious of shimmering dramatic segues between rehearsal room and Jackson’s childhood home, Wheeldon shows us a Jackson who can never escape the little boy berated nightly by his father to work harder, dream bigger, to remember that as a black boy he is never worthy of whatever he achieves.

And goodness can Frost dance, capturing precisely Jackson’s sublime, peculiarly agitated grace, his limbs seemingly made from tensile liquid as he thrusts and coils, shimmers and spins, like a man made from air and light, dancing on water. Blending a pop-video aesthetic with simply superb choreography, Wheeldon doesn’t stint on the big numbers – although he keeps us waiting for a nightmarishly reimagined Thriller in which Jackson is stalked by carnivalesque grotesques and a leering ringmaster.