Beatles tribute to play at Starbright

C’mon. Admit it. You know the words to every song, the nuance of each inflection, even how much breath it takes to sing “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

And so does Don Bellezzo. He is the creator of “Yesterday –– The Beatles Tribute,” a show that pays homage to the band that changed the music scene forever. He appears as John Lennon and said he makes the show as true to the original sound as possible.

“Yesterday” is set for 7 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Starbright Theatre, 2215 Thomas W. Ryan Blvd.

“My show, it’s all in the original key, and it’s exact,” he said. “If you take a song and play it a step down, in a different key, it’s not going to sound the same. It’s going to have less energy. They (members of the audience) may not know why, but it’s going to sound different. So, it’s important to have it in the original key.”

Alongside Bellezzo, Frank Mendonca takes the part of Paul McCartney, Carroll Parker appears as Ringo Starr, and Monte Mann appears as George Harrison.

The show opens with black-and-white footage from 1964 showing Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles on his television show. It includes shots of young women screaming hysterically in their seats. With the tempo set, the tribute band launches into a plethora of hits —“All My Lovin’ ,” “Please Please Me” and the Fab Four’s first No. 1 hit in America, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

What follows is more than an hour of songs through the years. It’s inevitable that the audience will end up singing along.

Mann has been portraying Harrison for the past 15 years. He sings lead on “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.”

How far into the show does the music grab the audience?

“I’d like to think pretty much from the get-go,” he said. “We come out full energy with ‘Twist and Shout,’ and usually that gets them up and going. Every tune, to me, is just such a hit.”

He said in rural areas, people tend to be “more polite and less demonstrative. Those are the kinds of folks you have to coax a little bit. Las Vegas, they’re ready to go. They’re there to party.”

The tribute show originated in 1986 when Bellezzo was a senior at Loyola University in Chicago. He was singing and playing guitar in coffeehouses. He was about to graduate but winced internally at the thought of a 9-to-5 job. It was his gig at the coffeehouse that spawned the idea for the tribute show.

“Whenever I would do a Beatles song, I got a really big reaction ... plus, it was probably the way I looked, with the hair and the whole thing,” he said. “I wanted to pursue a musical career, and I was told I should specialize, sort of the way a physician specializes in a particular branch of medicine. So, instead of doing a general top 40, I decided after seeing a bunch of Elvises (perform) around the country ... to focus on the Beatles.”

After college he put together the show and found three guys to round out the band. Their first gig was at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, Calif. There were roughly 300 people in the audience, Bellezzo said.

In the last 20 years, the show has toured America and been taken abroad. Its largest audience was in Madison, Wis., where an estimated 30,000 people saw them perform on the steps of the Capitol, backed up by a symphony orchestra.

In Las Vegas, “Yesterday” played at the Tropicana for five months. It also had a long-standing gig –– nearly three years –– at the Tropicana’s sister property in Atlantic City, N.J.

Bellezzo’s tribute band was so high- profile that it caught the notice of Apple executives and was sued for copyright infringement. It had to remove the Beatles logo from the drumhead and strike any service marks.

“People ask me if I’ve ever met the Beatles,” Bellezzo said. “I say, ‘No, just their lawyers.’ ”

Wherever it performs, the band plays true to the Beatles’ original recordings –– the same key, the same pauses, the same enunciations, the same everything.

One might think it would get old for the performers, but Bellezzo said that while he’s on stage, he pretends he’s at the Hollywood Bowl if it’s an outdoor gig or on stage at the historic Ed Sullivan Show if it’s an indoor venue.

“I just get into that whole frame of mind, like an actor,” he said.

“Yesterday” also has an educational outreach aspect, going into high schools for special seminars. The band has not been invited to do it in Las Vegas but has visited schools in Louisiana, Ohio, New York and Texas. The students, they find, are either really interested in music and apt to ask technical questions or are more inclined to the fan magazine approach.

“They’ll ask questions like, ‘What kind of guitars did the Beatles use?’, ‘Why did they use those kinds of guitars?’, ‘What strings did they use?’ ”, Bellezzo said. “The people who don’t know too much about music will just ask things like, ‘How tall is Paul McCartney?’, ‘How many times did he get married?’ and ‘John Lennon, what was his favorite color?’ ”

Tickets are $17 for Sun City Summerlin residents and $22 for nonresidents. All ticket sales are check or cash (exact change required). No credit cards will be accepted. For up-to-date information on Starbright Theatre shows, call 702-240-1301 or the box office at 800-595-4849.

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Contact Summerlin/Summerlin South View reporter Jan Hogan at jhogan@viewnews.com or 702-387-2949.