What Fifty Empty Nights Taught Me

This Is It

In the spring of 2009, working with AEG Live, I was closely involved in preparing Michael Jackson’s This Is It residency at The O2 Arena. Fifty nights. Every seat sold. Every cue, every load-in, every contingency rehearsed to the minute. It was the most ambitious production I had ever touched — and then it became the production that would never open.

Jackson died in June 2009. The curtain did not rise. See Events for the rest of the production record.

Why does preparation still count if the show never opened?

What stays with me is not the scale. It is the preparation. Months of invisible work by hundreds of people, done to a standard that assumed the curtain would rise. When the unthinkable happened, what remained was the most thoroughly prepared show never staged. The work did not become worthless because it was never seen. Preparation, I learned, is its own kind of monument.

I did not know then how directly that lesson would transfer.

How did arena discipline show up in DEC appeal work?

Years later, coordinating four international appeals for the Disasters Emergency Committee on behalf of Christian Aid, I recognised the same muscle. A water truck is a cue. A distribution route is a running order. Logistics is compassion at speed, and the discipline of the arena floor turns out to be the discipline of disaster relief — the difference is only what is at stake.

The appeals themselves are a public ledger of £169 million against DEC reports. That arithmetic lives in the DEC explained note, not in this essay. This essay is about the habit underneath: do the work as if the curtain will rise, even when you cannot promise that it will.

The show is never the point. The readiness is the point.

So I think of the crew, the dancers, the band — everyone who gave that production their best work — and of the man it was all for. Fifty empty nights, and not one of them wasted.