Vocal Accords
Christina Bianco may be a hit impersonating divas, but audiences are just as thrilled with her real voice
In August 2013, Christina Bianco posted a YouTube video of her performance of Total Eclipse of the Heart, in which she impersonates, with razor-sharp accuracy and at the drop of a hat, a myriad of divas — everyone from Celine and Adele to Barbra, Bette and Liza with a Z. Just over a year later, the video has more than 6.6 million views. Viral is an understatement.
“It’s amazing,” marvels Bianco. “I had no idea it was going to take off. So many people know me from that video, I actually have fans now.”
Those fans followed Bianco to the video she posted this past February, a diva mashup of “Let It Go,” from the Disney animated hit, Frozen. That video now has over 5.5 million views. But Bianco, who realized from an early age that she could effortlessly mimic the voices of others, is a spectacular singer in her own right, and a mainstay of the popular, decades-strong Forbidden Broadway franchise. She’s currently featured in London’s West End production of the show.
When Bianco, who grew up in Rockland County and calls herself “a 100 percent Italian New Yorker — there’s no BS with me,” appears with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Superpops next week, alongside fellow Broadway belters Ben Crawford, Ted Keegan, and Ron Remke, she’ll be singing most of the musical hits in her own, gorgeous, god-given voice. Yet she’s not going to let down her fans. There will be diva impersonations.
“I feel a responsibility to put them in my shows,” concedes the perky, self-effacing young woman. “But if I do impression after impression it can get old. If you put them in between me singing like myself, the impressions actually become a little more clear because the audience knows it’s not what I sound like.
“The symphony hires me to sing in my own voice,” continues Bianco, who appeared this past summer for the first time at the world-renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, “so [the impressions are] just a lovely little thing that make their way into the show. Most of the show is just me as me, which is great, because that’s my own voice, that’s what I’ve worked for. The audience may know me from the YouTube videos, but the more they get to know me, the more they want to know of Christina, not just Christina’s voice.”
Christina Bianco sings with the BSO Superpops on Thursday, Oct. 9 at the Music Center at Strathmore and on Friday, Oct. 10 to Sunday, Oct. 12 at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore. Tickets start at $40. Call 410-783-8000 or visit BSOmusic.org.
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