By Madeline Baker, Times Chronicle
The Yellow Brick Road Experience, an Elton John tribute coming to Oliver’s Venables Theatre this April, has been a lifetime in the making for frontman Andrew Johns.
As a precocious young performer entertaining elementary and junior high school audiences, Johns found himself returning to Elton John songs again and again because, quite simply, they were the radio hits best suited to a piano-playing singer like himself. In Johns’ own words: “He was kind of a hero of mine before I knew how good he was.”
Although Johns saw some success in the 1980s with his band Boulevard, he eventually returned to two of his early heroes for inspiration when planning his next career move: Elton John, and revolutionary classical musician and comedian Victor Borge.
“I’ve thought about doing this for 30 years,” Johns admitted. “It took meeting [concert promoter] Mike [Schell], who’s been doing this kind of tribute stuff for 20 years himself, for us to collaborate and kick my butt to actually do it. Another 10 years of my life might have gone by without me actually putting together a nine-piece Elton John band.”
Their first challenge in putting together the show was working out how to make themselves stand apart from, in Johns’ words, “50,000 other tribute guys doing Elton John.” According to Johns, the trademark lavish costumes that have formed Elton John’s visual identity throughout his career make him a popular choice for impersonators.
“Anybody can put on the hat, the glasses, the feather suit,” said Johns, who prefers to keep his costumes on the identifiable but minimal side. “There’s one act out of Vancouver that has dancers all over the stage, but they’re not playing [the songs] in the right keys. They’re playing mistakes even in their promo.
“So what we want to get out there and do is show [audiences] that we’re doing arrangements of these songs that no one else is doing, and we’re doing songs that none of these other tributes are probably trying because they’re not good enough.”
Johns never loses this bold confidence when speaking about The Jets, his backing band, which features former Parachute Club singer Julie Masi, prolific studio and touring bassist Dennis Marcenko, and musical theatre drummer Scott Gamble.
Once he had what he proudly calls “the best band in Western Canada” formed and ready, it was obvious to Johns that this abundance of technical music skill would be the key he was looking for to set The Yellow Brick Road Experience apart from other Elton John tribute acts.
While they do change and reinterpret some of the original arrangements to breathe fresh life into well-known songs, it is also a point of pride for Johns that they perform all the songs in their original key signature instead of pitching them lower to make the show easier for himself and the other vocalists to repeat night after night.
Band members also challenge themselves and each other by taking on songs they once considered too difficult, such as the lushly orchestrated Philadelphia Freedom or the 12-minute epic Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding. Philadelphia Freedom has since become a mainstay of the Yellow Brick Road Experience along with other hits like Rocket Man, Your Song, and naturally, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
The final unique ingredient that Johns and the Jets bring to The Yellow Brick Road Experience is a dash of comedy, which is where Johns took inspiration from his “ultimate hero” Victor Borge’s unique blend of slapstick and musical virtuosity.
Whether it’s band members imitating instruments with their mouths when they don’t have one close at hand, Johns climbing under the piano to play part of Benny and the Jets “upside down and backwards,” or the audience being encouraged to sing along with some clever improvised wordplay, unexpected laughs can pop up throughout the show.
While all these different facets of their performance help to set The Yellow Brick Road Experience apart from other Elton John tributes and keep every member of the audience engaged from start to finish, Johns himself has never found himself needing to rekindle the magic in what they do.
“I’ve probably played some of his songs almost as much as he has, and I’m still not tired of them,” said Johns. “[Boulevard] had about four hits on MuchMusic and there’s certainly some of those where I’m like, yeah, I’m kinda done with that. But his songs, I don’t get tired of them, and I’ve played Your Song probably a thousand times.”
The Yellow Brick Road Experience comes to Venables Theatre on Saturday, April 22 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $54 and can be purchased online at venablestheatre.ca.
