Still a thriller Small details key to portraying Michael Jackson in musical By: Ben Waldman Posted: 4:58 PM CDT Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025

He’s in the midst of a North American tour playing the King of Pop, but Jordan Markus didn’t intend to audition for the leading role in the Tony-winning jukebox musical MJ.

“I sang for every other male role in the show,” recalls Markus, 25, who grew up in Atlanta and New Orleans. “Once I finished singing, the team looked at me and asked if I knew any Michael Jackson songs.”

Three years later, Markus is still playing the headliner behind the headlines in the show, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon (whose 2015 remount of An American in Paris was nominated for a dozen Tonys) with a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage (Sweat, Ruined).

Taking place during the leadup to Jackson’s Dangerous tour in 1992, the musical takes shape during the “apotheosis of his creative journey,” Nottage told the New York Times in 2019, a period which was also marred by the first allegations of Jackson’s history of both sexual abuse and pedophilia.

Rather than produce a “cradle-to-grave” story, taking audiences from Jackson’s ABCs to his sudden death in 2009, Nottage said ahead of the show’s première that she and Wheeldon wanted to develop a theatrical show centred on a moment of pressure and transformation for a former child star who never knew the luxury of a private life, struggling with the tipping scales of fame and the public eye.

For Markus, whose earlier credits included regional productions of Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, Little Shop of Horrors and Xanadu, the role of Jackson offered the challenge of both establishing an accurate re-creation of iconic choreography and commitment to the gruelling rehearsal regimen that kept MJ and his backup dancers on their toes for the duration of a world tour.

“Anyone can put on a fedora and some loafers and say that they’re Michael, but the devil is in the details,” says Markus, who worked closely with Jackson’s longtime creative collaborators Rich and Tone Talauega to understand the 13-time Grammy winner’s dedication to his craft that made him one of the bestselling music artists of all time (1983’s Thriller has sold the most albums ever, with an estimated 70-million copies moved since its 1982 release).

“During our first session, we spent an entire week working on Billie Jean, but just the first eight counts.The details are what made Michael.”

Markus, whose movement training was mostly oriented around hip hop in Atlanta, says the range of Jackson’s dance inspiration ran the gamut from Fred Astaire to the high-flying tap-dancing duo the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold.

“He’s the culmination of so many decades of dance before him. His inspiration knew no bounds. He really fused street-style dance — breaking, popping and locking — with the roots of jazz, ballet and tap,” says Markus, who toured with the show as a standby for six months before taking on the role in December 2023.

To prepare for the role, and to understand Jackson’s mindset before his scandal-plagued 1990s, Markus, who is also a recording artist, read the star’s autobiography, Moonwalk, published in 1988, two or three times.

Released on the heels of Jackson’s album Bad, the book was edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who asked in her introduction, “What can one say about Michael Jackson?”

In reading Moonwalk, Markus sought to grasp the feeling of a deeply flawed and contradictory artist with otherworldly talents and celebrity quirks — the fact that he owned a chimp named Bubbles hardly registers as a surprise.

But only through relentless rehearsal and performance could the actor begin to empathize with Jackson’s devotion to entertain at all costs: that first Billie Jean session left Markus’s thighs screaming, he says.

“Nothing could have prepared me for a role like this,” says Markus, who just wrapped a six-week run at Toronto’s Ed Mirvish Theatre. “Playing Michael is the pinnacle of commitment and physicality. It’s everything that you think it is — times 10.”

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca