Just after melodically declaring that he needs your body, baby, from dusk till dawn (and your, muah, muah, muah, muah, muah, Kiss), Frank Moore—or more accurately, Prince, for the remainder of this quarter-hour—halts briefly to gauge the pulse of the audience.
“Ya’ll havin’ a good time?” he asks. “I hope so because I’m baking like a meatloaf under this wig.” Fortunately, he’s got a shaved head below that copious mop, cooling his cranium a bit. Speaking of artificial accoutrements atop the noggin …
Beneath a blonde mass of hair weave, shortly after melodically declaring that she lives for the applause, applause, applause, she lives for the applause-plause, Katie Steele—or more accurately, Lady Gaga, for a different quarter-hour—halts briefly to query the crowd on whether they doubt she qualifies as a “legend.” Don’t we know that she was the first musician to score Oscar, Grammy and Super Bowl performance gigs in the same year?
“I think that makes me a legend in the making,” she boasts, her nasally honk and deliberate delivery evoking the star’s unique sense of showmanship.
At tribute/impersonator mainstay Legends in Concert at the Flamingo's Donny & Marie Showroom, faux-fame is the name of the game. And these two play with consummate skill.
*****
Prince smolders (when did he not?) from an old Entertainment Weekly cover propped in the corner of the dressing room table, as inspiration for the hour-long transformation from Frank Moore to the sadly late—but in a cultural sense, surely eternal—Prince Rogers Nelson. That—and decades of passion for the Purple Pioneer.
Prince’s purple essence permeated Moore’s psyche back in 1983, when “Little Red Corvette” motored up the charts and he was riveted by Prince’s provocative androgynous style. “He was creating himself,” Moore says. “He wasn’t seeing himself through the eyes of other people but through his own eyes. I admired that.”
Told he resembled the pop dynamo, Moore didn’t believe it until he donned the hairpiece—then tested it on Halloween as he went “adult trick or treating.” Decked out in wig-to-boots Prince regalia, he wound up mobbed by fans mistaking him for His Royal Badness. “Everybody thought I was the real Prince—I got scared. Me and my friends had to run through an alley.”
Fear faded, though. “I won a lip-sync contest and that’s when I thought, ‘I can make money doing this,’” Moore says. “And it just took off, like it was meant to happen.” So convincing is his impersonation that he was cast as Prince for a comedy cameo in Scary Movie.
Yet his most vivid purple moment unfolded the night his idol died, as Moore ventured out before his segment—something he’d never done—and emotionally pleaded with the audience to help him perform through his grief if he faltered.
“I explained the connection I had with him, even though I didn’t know him personally,” Moore recalls, tearing up at the memory." Then came ‘Purple Rain,’ I was a mess. ‘Never meant to cause you any sorrow’—then tears. I put the microphone out to the audience and they sang it for me. I had hope in humanity just because of that.”
Now, more than inhabiting the legend, Moore resurrects him in Legends.
Splayed across the table are the cosmetic tools of the tribute trade: foundation, lipsticks, liquid and black eyeliners, blush, throat spray, powder, purple eyeshadow, makeup brushes, sequined shirt, sparkly trench coats, platform boots and twin wigs (for luxuriously haired ’80s Prince and shorter-cropped, ’early-aughts Prince). Plus Reese’s Pieces (a man’s gotta munch). And so it begins.
“When I first started I didn’t know how to do makeup that well,” says Moore—now 15 years into his Legends career—as he applies foundation and pancake makeup to correct being “a shade lighter” than Prince. “I looked like a ghetto Prince: bad wig, not enough makeup, bad eyeliner, a moustache drawn on with a pencil. But I started working with drag queens who gave me tips. Those guys know how to do makeup.”
Every anatomical adjustment matters—like contouring his nose a la The Royal One. “There’s like a little ball on the top part of his nose,” he says, preferring to refer to the superstar in the present tense as he points toward the EW cover. “When I’m putting the eyeliner on, Prince’s eyes have a certain shadow on them that mine don’t have so I have to paint that on. And you have to pack it on, otherwise you’ll fade in the lights. My lips are not as pouty and full as Prince so I draw over my lip with a lip liner pencil.”
Applying Prince’s sleek moustache, he sketches it on with black eyeliner, then fills in small dots and hairs with liquid liner. Next comes the Prince jawline—smoother than his more chiseled feature, so Moore contours once again, softening the jawline with black eye shadow. “Otherwise,” he says, “I’d look like Dudley Do-Right Prince.” Black lipstick creates the sideburns, and lip liner adds the Prince left-cheek mole—on the wrong cheek?
“I do everything on the opposite side because I want it to be like a mirror image of Prince,” Moore says. “So with the (longer) ‘Purple Rain’ wig, if he has the hair covering one eye, I have it covering the other eye.”
Glistening now in a sequined shirt, Moore points out the visual trick that minimizes the height gap between the 5-foot-2-inch legend and his 5-foot-6-inch doppelganger. “When I saw him in person he looked like a little doll with pumps,” Moore says. Noting that wearing his costume tightly only accentuated the 4-inch difference, he now opts for larger sizes. “People used to say I looked like Prince on steroids so I try to look as small as I can onstage.”
Draped now in a glittery gown-style coat, Moore runs a hand over the black-and-silver sequins that suddenly flip over to gold under his touch. And finally … “When I put the wig on is when I really look like him,” Moore says, affixing it to his shaved dome that gives way to a Princely brunette wave. “There you go—Prince!”
*****
She’s holding up that green thing. Technically, it’s a copy of a Swarovski crystal-studded leotard with hump-like, semi-heart-shaped shoulder pads that made a splash at the 2010 Grammy Awards.
Really, though, it’s a green thing Katie Steele holds up in the dressing room closet—and will wear in about 90 minutes as Katie becomes Lady. “It’s like small toddlers on each shoulder,” Steele says of her centerpiece costume. “And platform shoes. I had to take out extra insurance when I started wearing them.” She’s kidding. We think.
“And here’s the bubble dress,” she says, gathering up the outrageous outfit that clacks when handled as the hard plastic orbs bounce and bang about. “I wear clear hooker heels with this that are about 7 inches high.” Yet this costume is worn only while walking out for the finale bow. “I don’t perform in it,” Steele says. “It becomes a liability when you try to dance in it.”
Inhabiting the persona of Lady Gaga, one of pop culture’s leading provocateurs, is like trying to throw a feast of fabulousness onstage—visually and musically. “I really attacked it as an actress does taking a role in a play, in terms of a method acting approach,” says Steele—a 15-year Legends vet also known for her Kathy Griffin tribute act—who assumed the Gaga challenge in 2011.
Hours perusing YouTube, studying performance videos and interviews, analyzing how Gaga—whose mouthful of a real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta—sings, dances, moves and plays onstage, helped form Steele’s interpretation. Plus she dropped in on a couple of Gaga’s Vegas performances.
“It’s really about embracing and encompassing her attitude,” Steele says. “She’s a very brassy woman, extremely passionate and emotional—which I can be as well, ask my kids,” she says with a giggle. “A lot of people have compared her to Madonna with the shock value, but once she was able to get a space in the industry, she started really unfolding as a musician and artist. It’s a whole bunch of layers and that’s what’s amazing.”
Performance-wise, copying Gaga’s moves—including her distinct staccato-style walk—actually required Steele to dial down her natural abilities. “I’m a much better dancer and mover than Gaga is—all ego aside, thank you. It’s hilarious having to staccato it up. She doesn’t have a dance background, though she’s improved. She’s a musician and vocalist first.”
Vocally, though, Steele concedes that she doesn’t naturally sound much like Gaga—she says she employs phrasing, mannerisms, facial expressions, ad-libs and overall ’tude to help sell the character—but can come close. When speaking, Steele says she can easily mimic how Gaga “loves to AR-TI-CU-LATE.” Still, adjustments must be made when she launches into songs, given Gaga has a much lower register than Steele, a natural soprano.
“We have different schnozzes, different nasal cavities,” she says. “’Bad Romance’ is one that’s at the very low end of my register and once you get dancing and winded, it’s hard for me to hit my lower register. But once I hit the pocket I’m good.”
Physically re-creating Gaga, a 45-minute process, begins with the look—above the costume. And it requires major makeup to effect this transformation. “Gaga just has massive Italian features. Katie Steele has smaller, Swedish features,” says Steele, who must significantly enlarge them—making the eyes bigger and wider, the lips larger and longer, and contouring the chin. “I think our noses are similar but I still have to contour because (Gaga) went and got a bunch of nose jobs. Must be nice. Maybe if I could get her paycheck for a month I could do the same.”
Cue the whacked-out, wildly inventive costumes, plus a stockpile of hair weave—“you have no idea how much money I’ve spent on weave,” she says—and voila!: Lady Gaga.
One caveat when you watch her perform: “We don’t have the meat dress—it’s too hot in Vegas, people,” Steele says. “It’s in the freezer.” She’s kidding. We think.
*****
Comparisons to the real deals frighten none of the "Legends" as Moore opens the production that will be followed by Steele and climaxed by Whitney Houston and Elvis Presley tribute artists.
Videos unspool on overhead screens as Moore—wailing on a replica of Prince's signature cloud guitar—runs through “Little Red Corvette,” “1999,” “Let's Go Crazy,” “Purple Rain,” “I Would Die 4 You” and “Kiss,” the late legend seemingly performing (albeit it silently) alongside the “Legend.” Striding purposely and Prince-like across the stage, Moore executes a leg split a la His Purpleness and cracks: “I hope you saw that because I'm not doing it again.”
Once Moore departs, Steele's mimicry of Lady Gaga's distinctive nasality and clipped AR-TI-CU-LA-TION cuts through the showroom. As videos of The Outrageous One stream onscreen, Steele—wriggling in a beige and silver bustier, fringes spinning around her hips—tackles a set bouncing through “Applause,” “Just Dance,” John Lennon's “Imagine” (an acoustic segment seated at the piano), “The Edge of Glory,” “Poker Face” and “Born This Way.” Wading into the crowd, she kibitzes and cajoles, stopping to flirt (and stroke the bald dome) of a bashful patron.
During the segment she segues into a pristine white gown, and then, in the sartorial climax, That Green Thing, abetted by a bejeweled red eye mask, the overall look resembling a miniature, misshapen—but weirdly sexy—Christmas tree.
Striking a pose, she lets a wave of woo-hoo’s! wash over her.
Faux fame’s the name of this game. And this is how you play it.
