A child on “Good Times” and a teen on “Fame,” Janet Jackson now returns to television for her second HBO concert.
“It’s not often HBO asks someone to do more than one of these (televised concerts), so I was very flattered,” she says.
With a vast catalog of hits ranging from quiet ballads (“Let’s Wait Awhile, Again”) to numbers made for dancing (“Rhythm Nation,” “What Have You Done for Me Lately”), the Grammy-winning Jackson can be seen Sunday (8 p.m. ) in a concert taped at Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium. Sure to include lots of her typically strong choreography, the Hawaiian date is part of Jackson’s “All for You” tour and marks her first TV appearance since 1998’s Emmy-winning “Janet: The Velvet Rope” on HBO.
Named MTV’s first mtvICON and given the American Music Awards’ Award of Merit last year, Jackson (who is up for more Grammys next week) spent several days in Hawaii prior to the taping of the HBO show. She says she would have been just as happy to have the performance shown live: “Why it was done this way, I have no clue. We went live the last time, so it would have been totally cool with me to do this the same way. (The TV version) is pretty much the same concert that the live audiences see, though there might be a couple of extra pieces here or there. For the most part, it’s the same exact show.”
While she credits her early TV acting experiences with helping her launch her career, the soft-spoken Jackson believes she’d be comfortable on television without them. “I’m never even aware that the cameras are there,” she claims. “It’s all about the performance. It might be different for me if it was a theatrical role, but with something like this, you really just do your thing. The way I see it, the cameras are meant to follow you, but there’s still a certain staging involved.”
The telecast from Honolulu reunites Jackson with “Velvet Rope” director David Mallet, who has also overseen HBO concerts starring Cher and Whitney Houston. “We truly do work well together,” Jackson says of Mallet. “He’s very talented, and we had so much fun doing “The Velvet Rope,” the minute the opportunity came up for this – which I think was during rehearsals, even before we did our first show – I jumped at it.”
Jackson knew she would have to deliver something fresh, “but I think there are certain things that audiences expect. At the same time, I think it’s important to ‘switch it up’ a little. You don’t necessarily have to do an entire routine they might know, but maybe just the catchiest steps. There are other times you might want to keep a certain routine, like “Rhythm Nation,” just as it was. You just don’t touch things like that, but you can rechoreograph other numbers. You have to stay aware of what the public expects from you, and that tells you what to throw away and what to keep.”
The varying styles and tempos of Jackson’s hits also help her pace herself during a performance. “I look at it as bringing the audience up and keeping them there,” she says, “then bringing them down. You can’t stay ‘up’ too long, because it’s just too tiring.”
Jackson and her accompanying dancers go into her tours physically prepared. “On the “Velvet Rope” tour, we worked out six days a week, on top of doing the two-hour show at night. We’d do an hour of cardio, then an hour or hour-and-a-half of lifting, then jump in the shower to get ready to go to the venue and do the show. It’s been a little different this time … I’ve been kind of bad, but I’ve gotten back into the regular routine in the last few weeks. I missed it, and I felt that my body was just craving it,” Jackson says.
