Can Michael Jackson play live?

Jackson made a brief and incoherent appearance in London today to speak a few words, most of them unintelligible, and allow his picture to be taken in front of a group of what you can assume were carefully chosen screaming fans.

It’s unclear why he needed the teleprompters.
The reason was to announce some live shows in London his summer; he wasn’t specific, but according to the papers he will be performing nine dates, or perhaps 20 or maybe 25, starting on July 9 or perhaps July 10, depending on which account you read.
I am not sure how this debilitating appearance could be described by someone at the LA Times in this way: “The Man in the Mirror looked pretty healthy, put together and focused.” But you can see the spectacle for yourself here.

Jackson’s money problems are at once rococo and mundane, the former because they involve debts, liens, loans and such in the seven, eights and nine figures, the latter because it really just comes down to the fact that he really hasn’t earned any money in more than ten years. He doesn’t sell records and he doesn’t tour, and from the outside seems to have had a lot of living expenses, not to mention legal fees for his multiple highly publicized sex scandals with under-aged boys and whatever out-of-court settlements may have been part of the underpublicized ones.
In any case, his financial problems have had their cost. Sony/ATV, his main asset, which he used to own half of, he now apparently owns one quarter of; and whatever money that holding does throw off has seemingly not been enough to keep him in the black. Beyond that, he’s lost control of Neverland and, it seems, the Jackson family Havenhurst house in Encino; and a company called Colony Capital, which bought a loan Jackson was in default on, is basically in a position to make him earn some money.

That was the situation at the beginning of last summer, when a series of leaks raised speculation that Jackson might be doing an extended Las Vegas appearance. Note that nearly nine months have gone by; and the shows have been moved to Europe, which to Jackson’s way of thinking probably represents a less-demanding audience*; and what was billed as a Celine Dion-style extended stay in Vegas could end up being as few as nine or ten shows.

I don’t feel sorry for hedge funds as a matter of principle, but you have to figure Jackson has not been making the Colony Capital money boys’ lives easy.
Anyway, the point of all this is just that it’s unclear whether Jackson can tour any more. Acts commercially puny by comparison—Madonna, the Police—gross hundreds of millions of dollars touring. Jackson has been known to collapse at the prospect of merely a TV appearance, and has managed to hail his ass onstage barely a handful of times this decade. It’s the one thing, too, that explains the year after year of living off his assets: It could be the one thing he knows for sure is that he can’t make money any more.
* His last world tour, back in the mid-90s, featured exactly one U.S. date—in Hawaii.