Michael Jackson’s Final Rehearsal That Left 43 Crew Members Standing in Silence D
The music stopped at exactly 11:47 in the evening. Not because the song ended, because Michael Jackson stopped it. He was standing at the center of the Staples Center rehearsal stage in Los Angeles, surrounded by 43 dancers, musicians, and production crew members. In the middle of a run through of Earth song, and he stopped.
He turned around slowly. He looked at the staging behind him. He looked at the screens. He looked at the lighting rig above, and then he said something so quietly that the people standing nearest to him had to lean in to hear it. “It is not big enough,” he said. “The ending, it needs to be bigger.” The production director looked at his clipboard.
The lighting designer looked at her board. The choreographer looked at the floor, because they all understood what bigger meant for Michael Jackson in the 23rd week of rehearsals for the most expensive concert production in the history of the music industry. It meant starting over. It meant rebuilding. It meant that the ending they had spent 6 weeks perfecting was in Michael’s assessment not yet what it needed to be, and not one person in that room argued with him.
Because not one person in that room had ever seen Michael Jackson be wrong about what a moment needed to be. That was the 23rd of June, 2009, two nights before the night that ended everything. But that wasn’t even the shocking part. The real story started 18 months before that evening, in a creative meeting where Michael Jackson walked in with a notebook and said four words that his production team would spend the next year and a half trying to keep up with. Let me tell you.
January 2008, Michael Jackson had not performed on a major stage since the History World Tour in 1997. He had not released a studio album of new material since Invincible in 2001. To the music industry. His silence read as absence. To Michael, it read as preparation. He had spent the years between 2001 and 2008 watching.
Watching how technology had changed what was possible on a stage. Watching what other artists were doing and cataloging where the ceiling was. Watching his own previous tours in footage and identifying every moment that had not reached what he had imagined it could be. When he sat down with Kenny Ortega, the director and choreographer who had worked with him since the 1980s, in January 2008, he opened a notebook that Ortega later described as unlike anything he had encountered in 30 years of professional production work. It was not a set list. It was not a mood board. It was a document. Page after page of specific ideas, lighting effects described in technical detail, staging concepts sketched with architectural precision, choreographic sequences notated in a language that was entirely Michael’s own visual concepts for screen content that would require production teams that didn’t yet exist to execute. Michael went through the notebook page by page.
“This is what I want.” he said. “I want to know what is impossible, and then I want us to figure out how to do it anyway.” Ortega called it the most ambitious brief he had ever received from any artist in any medium. AEG CEO Randy Phillips, who came in after the initial meetings, called it something that would either be the greatest show ever staged or the greatest challenge ever attempted.
Both of them were right. The This Is It production began assembling in the spring of 2008. The scale was unprecedented. Screens that had never been built at that size. Hydraulic staging systems that required custom engineering. A 3D film component that involved shooting new content with directors who had worked on major motion pictures.
A set for Thriller that required 47 separate technical elements to function simultaneously. The production team grew to over 200 people. The budget grew with it. Michael was present for every significant creative decision. Not as a figurehead or an approving authority, as a collaborator. He sat in production meetings for hours asking questions that revealed a technical understanding of stagecraft that repeatedly surprised people who had assumed they were working with an artist who would focus on the performance and leave the mechanics to others. He knew the mechanics. He had always known the mechanics. He had spent 40 years watching every element of his own productions with the specific attention of someone who understood that the production existed to serve the performance and the performance existed to serve the audience and the audience deserved everything. He rejected concepts that other artists would have accepted gratefully. He pushed back on screen content that hadn’t reached the emotional register he was looking for.
He sat with lighting designers and talked about the specific quality of light he wanted at specific moments in specific songs. In terms that made the designers understand they were talking to someone who had thought about this longer than they had. The production team stopped being surprised by this about 3 months in.
They started expecting it. They started building for it. Rehearsals began formally in April 2009 at the Forum in Inglewood. Then moved to the Staples Center. The first weeks were exploratory, Michael working with the dancers. Finding the show its shape, establishing the emotional through-line that would carry an audience across 3 hours.
He arrived at rehearsals later than scheduled more often than not. When he arrived, he worked with an intensity that erased the question of lateness. Travis Payne, the lead choreographer, said that watching Michael learn or relearn choreography in rehearsal was one of the most extraordinary professional experiences of his life.
Not because Michael was perfect immediately, he wasn’t always, but because of the speed and specificity with which he absorbed, refined, and made his own every element of every sequence. By May, the show’s architecture was clear. By June, it was extraordinary. The dancers who had been hired through a competitive audition process, many of them professional performers who had worked with major artists, said privately that they had not expected what they encountered.
They had expected to work with an icon. They found themselves working with a musician who knew every element of what they were building with the same depth they did, who could hear a piece of music and identify exactly where the staging needed to change. Who would stop a run-through at a specific moment, not because the choreography was wrong, but because the intention behind it hadn’t yet become visible.
On the 23rd of June, two nights before the night everything stopped, Michael ran Earth Song for the final time before what the production team believed would be the last full run-through before the London departure. Earth Song had always been the show’s emotional centerpiece. A performance that combined live singing, elaborate staging, choreography involving the full company, and a visual narrative on the screens above that had taken months of post-production work to create. The run-through went well.
By any objective professional measure, it was extraordinary, and Michael stopped it at 11:47 and said it needed to be bigger. The production team worked through the night. Michael went home. He came back the following afternoon, the 24th of June, and what Dorian Holly, his vocal director, and Travis Payne, and Kenny Ortega, and every member of the production crew who was present that day have described in consistent terms across every account that has surfaced in the years since is this. It was the best rehearsal they had ever seen. Not the best of the this is it rehearsals, the best rehearsal in 18 months of daily work, in 43 people’s collective professional experience, the best day. Michael came in focused and fully present in a way that the production team had been hoping would arrive and had not been certain it would. He worked through the set list with the kind of sustained concentration that turns a good show into something people remember for the rest of their lives. He made adjustments. He pushed for more.
He found in real time the specific emotional register that each song required and performed into it with everything he had. The Earth song ending, the one he had stopped two nights earlier, was rebuilt. When he ran it that afternoon, it was what he had known it needed to be. He stood at the front of the stage after the run, through ended, and looked out at the empty auditorium seats.
He stood there for a moment without speaking. Then he turned to Ortega. “The audience is going to feel this,” he said. “They’re going to feel it in their chest. That is what I want. I want them to feel it before they understand it.” He was right. He had always been right about that. What the audience would have felt in London, if the audience had ever arrived, is something that everyone who was in that Staples Center on the 24th of June has spent the years since trying to find language for. At the end of the day, as the production wound down and crew members began their end-of-session routines, Randy Phillips walked Michael to his car. Michael put his arm around Phillips. “Thank you for getting me this far,” he said. “I can take it from here. I know I can do this.” He left with a smile. He never came back. The morning of the 25th of June, 2009, the production team was preparing for what they believed would be a technical rehearsal. Calls went out.
People began arriving at some point in the mid-morning. The calls started coming in the other direction. Something had happened at the Carolwood Drive mansion. Something with Michael. Then, he is at UCLA Medical Center. Then, it is serious. Then, at 2:20 Jan 6 in the afternoon, the thing that 40 Jan 3 people in the Staples Center had no framework to receive.
The accounts of what happened in that building in the hours after the news arrived are consistent across every person who has spoken about it. The rehearsal space that 2 days earlier had held the best day of the production’s entire existence went completely silent. Dancers who had trained for years for the opportunity to be in this show sat on the floor of the stage.
Production staff who had spent 18 months building something unprecedented stood in the wings and couldn’t find anything to do with their hands. Kenny Ortega, who had worked with Michael Jackson for more than 20 years, sat in a production office and didn’t speak for a very long time.
The show had been scheduled to open at London’s O2 Arena on July 6th, 2009. The stage was built. The screens were ready. The technical systems were installed and tested. The set for Thriller was complete. The Earth Song ending was exactly what Michael had known it needed to be. None of it was ever used. The This Is It documentary, assembled from rehearsal footage and released 40 Jan 1 days after Michael’s death, was seen by 90 Jan 2 million people in 120 countries.
Everyone who watched it saw the same thing. A man 3 weeks from the greatest comeback in the history of popular music working at the absolute peak of his abilities building something extraordinary with 40 Jan 3 people who believed in it completely. Kenny Ortega has said in interviews that editing the documentary was the most difficult professional experience of his life.
Not technically, emotionally. Because every frame he reviewed was a frame of someone preparing for something that would never happen. Every note Michael hit in rehearsal was a note hit for a show that 40 Jan 3 people built and no audience ever saw. Travis Payne said something in a 2009 issue interview that has stayed with everyone who heard it.
He said that the hardest part was not the grief of losing Michael. The hardest part was watching the footage and seeing how ready he was. How completely, totally ready he was. 3 weeks from the stage. The stage was built, the show was ready, Michael Jackson was ready. Subscribe, leave a comment below.
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