Kenny Are You Okay?

He's no criminal, but they don't come any smoother than Kenny Wizz. The Los Angeles native started performing with street dance posses in the city of angels when he was just 14 – and when Michael Jackson dropped the Thriller album in 1982, the 20-year-old Wizz's life changed forever. He knew he'd be a lifelong fan.

“I grew up in LA, and the Jacksons had moved to LA from Gary, Indiana, so the Jackson Five had always been very popular there,” Wizz says. “Breakdancing was the big craze then, but Michael became known for incorporating different dance styles into his routines. That's where the Moonwalk came from, it was a street dance that everybody did. And he just took that to the world stage.”

People started to remark on Wizz's resemblance to Jackson, and he devoted himself to copying Jackson's style. Over the years, as he honed his act, his costumes and make-up have matched Jackson's in elaborateness as the famous singer constantly reinvented his image. “I've never had any surgery done, though,” he says. “I've always been able to recreate the look with make-up and costume. Whatever changes Michael made, I always embraced, because it was a challenge for me to recreate with makeup. It took me about five years to learn the makeup; I do it myself. It takes me a couple of hours to get ready before each show but it's very detailed. It has to be – people today look at me with a lot more scrutiny than they did before [Michael's death] so everything has to be spot-on.”

Wizz's act incorporates just enough of his own innovative street dance style to keep it fresh, but the bulk of it is devoted to recreating Jackson's well-known dance moves. He does it all, too – the soft-spoken Wizz has painstakingly taught himself to sing like the master. “The singing was more of a challenge than the dancing,” he says, “but it goes beyond all that – I have to learn the mannerisms. No one will ever match him completely; we're closer in some songs than in others. But it took me years to be able to be precise enough to sing and dance at the same time.”

The makeup, costumes, dance moves, singing, live band, video displays and lighting displays all combine to make Wizz's HIStory II a show that afforded him a Vegas residency for 11 years. But there's something Wizz can add to the experience that the King of Pop never could. “I try to do things he never had the opportunity to do, such as during the show I'll come out through the audience,” Wizz says, “or after the show I'll sit and sign autographs and take pictures one-on-one. That was something Michael probably wanted to do but you have to understand, he often performed to arenas of 60,000 people, so he couldn't.”