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Singing impressionist Veronic DiCaire’s showcase familiar yet unique

You go where the work is. Especially when Celine Dion needs an opening act.

There are many singers but fewer singing impressionists, and most of those are men. Veronic DiCaire had put a few points on the board as a singer and was recording a third album when her career received a sudden nudge of redirection.

The Ontario, Canada, native was working on the album with Marc Dupre, a singer, songwriter and son-in-law of Rene Angelil, the husband and manager of Dion.

Dion was ready to go out on her 2008 “Taking Chances” world tour, and the Angelils had learned from past experience that impressionists made good opening acts. Las Vegas’ own Gordie Brown was lined up for the English-speaking cities, but his verbal song parodies weren’t going to work on 14 tour stops with a predominantly French-speaking audience.

Dupre was offered the job but “didn’t want to do comedy any more,” Angelil remembers. So Angelil put Dupre in charge of replacing himself. Dupre knew DiCaire had a handful of impressions, including a Celine Dion, that she used for comic relief in her own act.

“I was doing this only to make my friends laugh, and technicians and musicians,” she recalls. “I didn’t think of making a career out of it. For me, it was just to make fun of these singers.”

Dupre sent a DVD to the Angelils. “We looked at it together, Celine and me, and we were laughing so much,” Angelil recalls of giving the go-ahead for Dupre to stop work on the album and begin helping DiCaire polish her impressions.

“When we had to, that’s when we realized that she could work on a voice and get it, whereas the (original) ones came naturally,” says Remon Boulerice, DiCaire’s husband and manager.

The tour opened the door to Angelil producing DiCaire’s show in increasingly larger venues in Canada and France. That in turn led to an offer for her to be a judge on the Canadian version of “X Factor.”

Now comes Las Vegas. Billed in single-name tradition as Veronic (pronounced Ver-oh-neeq), the Bally’s showcase “Voices” arrives as something at once familiar yet unique.

“I’m very confident that in a few months she will be a big star in this city,” says Angelil, who is co-producing the show with AEG Live and Ceasars Entertainment.

The era of male singing impressionists seemed to end with the untimely 2009 death of Danny Gans, and no one really missed it. Brown carves his own manic, stand-up comedy path, but the rest of them seemed mired in the same riffs on Elvis, Michael Jackson, Tom Jones, etc.

Angelil and Dion had, in fact, tried their luck with another male mimic, Andre-Philippe Gagnon, producing a Venetian showcase for him in 2000. But he arrived at the peak of Gans’ popularity, labored in his shadow and seemed already out of date.

Veronic does about 50 voices, all of them women. They are distinct and convincing, from Barbra Streisand and Karen Carpenter to Katy Perry and Adele.

And they are, for the most part, sincere. No quick-change wigs, no song parodies and very little shtick. (You have to grant a bit of Dolly Parton wiggle room.)

“There’s a thin line I don’t want to cross,” she says. “There’s not a lot of female impressionists, so you know what? Let’s honor those women. ... Sometimes it would be easy to make fun of them, but I also know there’s a career behind them, important steps they did to get where they are.”

Instead of parody, “I try to imagine as if they were my friends and we were having a glass of wine. What would be my approach to imitate them in front of them?”

The Angelils likely see kinship in DiCaire and Boulerice. The two work in tandem on every challenge of the new enterprise: What American divas should replace the French portion of the act? (That Diane Dufresne bit may slay in Canada, but would likely mean crickets here.)

Which new stars have a voice distinctive enough to imitate? In the age of Auto-Tune pop, “You think, whoa, where’s the real voice there?” DiCaire says.

But many of the impressions, guided along by a vocal coach of 15 years, begin with simply reversing many years of “fighting not to sound like them.”

“When I was a singer, singing covers, that was a problem,” she says. “But now I have to do that, note every breath, every tic they have. You have to be very careful on every detail so you can be right on.”

There’s one impression the 36-year-old didn’t have to study so hard: Celine Dion. When the superstar was just breaking with the “Beauty and the Beast” theme, “we all wanted to be like her. Our dreams were to have a career like hers. Some of my generation, we all sound like Celine when we’re singing our own songs.”

So, when asked which impression comes easiest for her — or which singer she sounds most like — the answer comes with an addendum.

“I sound like Sheryl Crow. My true voice is a bit of Sheryl Crow —”

“Mixed with Celine,” her husband adds.

Will we hear it? Perhaps.

In the preview shows for Bally’s employees leading up to this week’s opening, the two were still pondering that issue. But with 50 other voices, all of them more famous (in the United States at least), it’s simply a question of finding room for it.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@
reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.

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