American actress, singer and impressionist Christina Bianco is taking British musical theatre by storm. In recent years, she has played LV in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Glinda in The Wizard of Oz, and now the Narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. With Joseph in Manchester, we sat down with Christina to talk about her incredible career to date, and everything from the art of impression to artistic suppression.
I began the interview by telling Christina Bianco that I have been a fan of hers since before she started doing musical theatre.
“Thanks – I did musical theatre long before I did impressions, just nobody else knew!” she laughed. Indeed, I had just read that she had a stage career in her native US before her impressions went viral, but it is only in recent years that she has cemented herself as a stage sensation.
Christina told me that she started doing impressions without realising it. She had a tendency to mimic. Her mother would tell her to stop singing songs like the recordings but instead sing them like herself. She had thought that her mum (mom!) wanted her to change the musical phrasings but, come to realise it, her mother wanted her to stop impersonating.
However, it was not until around 2007 or 2008 that she took ownership over her impressions. At the time, she was doing voiceover work because of her vocal flexibility, e.g. her ability to voice old women and little kids, but not impressionism. Whilst working as a performer on “her first and last” cruise ship, she would watch comedians and variety acts do impressions. There was also a cast member who would do impressions backstage, and she knew that she could do them too but she did not want to compete – so she would do them alone, in her own cabin.
On the cruise ship, she told herself that she would audition for Forbidden Broadway if ever the opportunity arose. By fate, when she got back from the cruise, open auditions were held – and whilst shows generally don’t cast from Union-required open calls, actors still go because they might – and, indeed, she was cast, which changed her life.
Following this, she expanded her impression range beyond just theatre people and even beyond obvious celebrities: “You can do Celine Dion. You make your friends laugh doing Britney spears – lots of people can do Britney Spears. Can you do Shakira? Then I started implementing more pop people.”
As a huge Shakira fan, I of course asked her to do Shakira for me. She hilariously sang a snippet of ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ – on what was, coincidentally, the 19th anniversary of the song.
“If you can do Alanis, you can do Shakira. People always say, if you can do Celine Dion, you can do Shakira – it’s the same placement; it’s like a little bit tighter in the back of your throat,” she revealed.
Whilst Christina has mastered countless impressions, she admits that there are still “tons” of celebrities that she has struggled with.
“I gave up a long time ago trying to do Tina Turner. I’m a massive Tina Turner fan. [But] as you here from my voice, I do not have a raspy voice; there’s not a lot of grit to it. I can put on some grit when I’m doing someone like Miley Cyrus, and I can do the Aguilera growl,” she said, before demonstrating. “That’s different than actually having a voice with natural raspiness to it. I can do a great Tina Turner when I’m sick [but] this is not how you protect your voice for the rest of your life so I gave up because I don’t think it’s a mensch to do it.
“There are certain people I can’t do – Tina Turner, Mariah Carey – but one that I’m not giving up is niche but not niche for my circle, and that’s Jane Krakowski… I essentially should be able to do it; I almost talk like her – and it’s always those voices that are the most similar to your own that tend to sometimes be the hardest. So, her and Tina Fey, I can kind of do but not great, and it’s infuriating. So, those two I’m not giving up on; sometimes I get a line or two, and I throw them in, and I’m very proud of myself, but I need to be consistent and make them work.”
Whilst Christina is American, it seems to be British audiences that have truly fallen in love with her. I wondered if this was purely coincidental or if we respond to her, her work and her art differently (better) to American audiences.
“I think there is, which is why I live here now,” she admitted.
The opportunities she were offered in the UK, and Europe more broadly, were more well-rounded than those she would receive in the US. She believes that the immense size of the US makes it easy for people, particularly in the entertainment industry, to get compartmentalised. Thus, a lot of the opportunities she was getting were the same. She was always the “multi-character, multi-voiced person” even though she was doing work as a musical theatre performer and actress long before she was a viral impressionist – but the industry latched on to that.
“Every time I was asked to do something in the United Kingdom, it was always Christina first and the voices and characters second – and I never forgot that. It makes my life so much better because I love doing impressions and I love being silly, but I’m also Christina, and I love being her and I love acting and singing as me. So, I just found it was much easier for me to get a better balance of both here.”
Furthermore, she has always been an Anglophile. As a child, she would watch Absolutely Fabulous, Blackadder, and A Bit of Fry and Laurie.
“I didn’t even know what what happening on that show; half of it went over my head – but the physical comedy was great, and I was in love with Hugh Laurie, and I wasn’t turning it off.”
She has also always understood niche British accents; she remembers telling her parents what was being said in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Another possible reason for her sheer success in the UK is because it was after tickets went on sale for her two solo shows at the Matcham Room at the Hippodrome that her YouTube videos went viral – which led to two more (sold-out) shows being added. She found that her British audiences were more boisterous than her American audiences.
“I didn’t have to change my show. Everything I did in the States, I did in the UK, but then I threw in some of the British stuff I personally knew, which I think the British audience really appreciated – like, ‘She went out of her way to include this,’ but for me, it was just fun. I mean, give me an opportunity to do an Ab Fab impression or a Katherine Parkinson impression, I’m just even happier – and it annoys me that I can’t do them as freely in the States.”
The success of her Hippodrome concerts led to her being cast in the West End transfer of the Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of Forbidden Broadway, as two of the cast members were not available, and she had starred in the production on Broadway.
Christina mentioned that the likes of Judy Garland and Shirley Bassey had performed at the Matcham Room, prompting me to tell her that I saw her in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice – where she impersonated both of those divas.
“Oh, you’re one of the six people who saw that production – thank you so much for coming!” she joked.
I asked Christina how she found the meta experience of being an impressionist playing an impressionist.
She admitted that she had always wanted to do Little Voice, so she had been thinking about that question for a long time. She had to remind herself that the big impression scene is not Christina doing those impressions; it’s LV doing them.
“My Shirley Bassey and my Judy Garland and my Edith Piaf, Liza Minnelli – they’re all a little more contemporary, modern, energetic, heightened impressions, because that’s the way I know the audience loves it. But with LV, it’s actually more about what she would have been listening to, and watching very little – you know, LV didn’t have YouTube to go back and watch the way that those were done. There were only a few television performances, a few videos that she would, of course, watch over and over, I’m sure, in her obsessively compulsive way.
“It struck me that LV doesn’t have comedic timing; she is copying what those divas were doing and how they sounded. So, I had to separate myself from it. I went back and watched videos of those performances that I thought LV would be watching, and I listened to the recordings that were referenced in Jim Cartwright’s script – and that’s how I approached the impressions in the show. Now it’s [been] so many years that I was doing those impressions, I had to unlearn it.”
She had to do something similar playing Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. She tried to be seen for so many productions of Funny Girl in the US but it never happened – but the one time she auditioned for it in the UK, she got the part!
She approached the role completely separating herself from her Barbra Streisand persona, aware that she had to do her own thing and not imitate the actress that everybody associates with the role. “It was easy – just forget about everything you already know completely and try to do the opposite!”
Whilst I sadly did not see Christina in Funny Girl, I did see her in The Wizard of Oz at Curve in Leicester, where she played Glinda. Whilst the stage musical adaptation is fairly faithful to the film, Curve’s production (the regional premiere) is aesthetically quite different to not only the film but also the original (West End) production. Christina enjoyed starring in a production with a new take, even though a lot of people were incredibly upset about it – but she believes that you cannot win because people also complain when you do a carbon copy.
Christina is, of course, currently playing the Narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. She grew up listening to the soundtracks and previously starred in a production of Joseph as a kid and another production as an adult, where she got to do impressions. However, she never imagined she would one day play the Narrator in “the official Andrew Lloyd Webber-sanctioned” production.
She said that this production of Joseph, which premiered at the London Palladium a few years ago and is now on its second UK tour, is similar to the Curve production of The Wizard of Oz (which transferred to the London Palladium, where the original production had premiered years ago – a lot of links!), with both productions being more modern.
Christina revealed that the director, Laurence Connor, was unsure that he wanted to direct the show because it has been done so much so he did not know what he could bring to it. However, he saw his own kids in a school production of Joseph, and it hit him that the musical was written by teenagers for children, so he decided to bring back the child’s eye to make the show different – allowing the show to not take itself as seriously.
“It’s not lost on me, the people who’ve played this role before me – most of them are household names in the UK, and I know that, although I have a nice following, I’m not a household name. So, I’m just so grateful everyday – and I’m so grateful every time I do that that I moved to the UK!”
Whilst Christina has played some iconic roles, there are still “tons” of roles that she aspires to play.
“I’m probably a little old now [but] I’ve always wanted to be Dot in Sunday in the Park with George. And the other Sondheim thing – I will play any role in Into the Woods – I’d be the cow! The Baker’s Wife and the Witch, obviously, those are the big two. I would love to just absolutely be ridiculous as the Lady of the Lake in Spamalot. The other big one, but I think I’ve exhausted my run with Webber here, but I would still love to play Eva Perón in Evita. And then to throw a wacky one in – Pennywise in Urinetown,” she said.
“Notice that I’ve cut the sopranos out?” she laughed.
Evita and Into the Woods are coming back to London later this year!
I ended the interview, heavily, by asking Christina how important art is in the current political climate, especially in the US – from artistic censorship to Trump taking ownership of the Kennedy Center.
Christina had two false starts before admitting, “I’m so angry about everything; I just want to say this clearly.”
“When you try to suppress art, when you try to control art, when you try to censor art, you know something very bad is going on. You know why they do that? Because they know how strong and important art is. So, they can try, but it’s only going to make the artists try even harder and find other ways of reaching people. So, good luck and get ready for a fight!”
You can catch Christina Bianco in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat at Opera House Manchester until March 9 and on tour around the UK until August 10. You can also catch her solo show, Christina Bianco and her Technicolor Dream Cast, at The Brewers Manchester, on Canal Street, on March 9 – shortly after the final Manchester performance of Joseph!
Photo: © Tristram Kenton
JADAR 