Then in February, he fractured a toe on his right foot, and was out of the show for another few weeks it turned out Frost has a long second toe that was causing stress while he was moonwalking. In mid-December, just a few weeks after previews began, he got sick with the coronavirus. His run in the show has been, like this Broadway season, bumpy. “You can make it look very, very cool,” Frost said. Also: the side glide, a dance step associated with Jackson. “Wembley ’88! I try my best to match his energy.”)Īmong the hardest things to learn: breath control. (Why “Bad”? “Because it’s the best tour, to me,” he said. And he watched hours and hours of tour video - even now, before every performance he screens the “Bad” tour in his dressing room. He scrutinized interviews with Jackson, noting how he held his hands, which way he crossed his legs, what he did with his eyes when someone said something that made him uncomfortable. And he got vaccinated against the coronavirus - a requirement for working on Broadway. The production flew him to Los Angeles to spend several weeks studying with Rich and Tone Talauega, two brothers who had danced with Jackson. Once he got the job, the real work began. “When somebody says you have the opportunity to play Michael Jackson, that’s not something you just shrug off,” Frost said. And I was like, ‘This is where I want to be.’”Īs a junior, he played Warner in a school production of “Legally Blonde,” and as a senior, he was Lord Pinkleton in “Cinderella.” Plus, while wrapping up high school, he competed on “The Voice.” “I didn’t get a chair turn,” he said, “but it was still a learning experience” he also landed two small film roles. “I fell in love with the stage,” he said. The next thing he knew, he was playing Seaweed in the school’s production. “‘I don’t know anything about musicals.’” She told him to go home and watch “Hairspray” - the 2007 version, in which the characters sing. She needed students to audition for the school musical. A teacher heard him play, and asked if he could sing. One afternoon, he ducked into a chorus room to find solace at a piano. And he was not doing well: He felt like he didn’t fit in, and his grades were slipping. Wootton High School, where the students were predominantly white and Asian American. After a childhood spent at predominantly Black schools, he found himself at Thomas S. His artistic arc shifted during adolescence. He sang, and played the piano and drums, at church, and by middle school, he had formed an R&B cover band - Fresh Flights - that performed at shopping centers (among their first songs: “I Want You Back,” by the Jackson 5). “There’s a feeling you get when you listen to his music that makes you want to dance, makes you want to move,” Frost said. “That definitely has a lot to do with how I carry myself, and how I respect others.” “I’ve been backed my entire life by very, very strong Black women,” he said. Named for the jazz great Miles Davis, Frost grew up moving back and forth between Maryland and Washington D.C., raised by his mother, a systems engineer, and his grandmother, a schoolteacher. (“I want to be bigger than Michael Jackson,” he said. In conversation, Frost is warm and gracious (he loves the words “humbled” and “blessed”), but also soft-spoken and measured, with a relentless positivity and an all-things-are-possible way of talking about his career. It’s not my job to persuade or convince them of anything, but what I do want them to do is have a better understanding of the things that he had to go through - whether it’s financial or emotional - to put this tour together, because nobody can deny, and this is the bottom line, the impact that he has had on culture and on music.” “People come here every day with different opinions and different feelings about Michael. “My responsibility, and my job, is to focus on the creative process of Michael,” he added.
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