Lynn Nottage has won the Pulitzer Prize twice for her serious plays about black women, but when she was offered the chance to write a musical on the man dubbed “the King of Pop”, she didn’t hesitate.

“My life actually tracks with Michael Jackson’s, the first album I ever owned was [The Jackson 5’s] ABC, and it became so worn you couldn’t even hear the music anymore,” says the 60-year-old Brooklynite, who wrote the book for MJ The Musical. It has been seen by more than 1 million people since it premiered on Broadway in 2022, and opens in Sydney this weekend.