Five-Octave Range, High-Octane Ambition

A country fair that boasts Blackjack, the Giant Steer (“10,000 hamburgers on the hoof”); Harley, the Giant Pig; and an Uncle Sam on stilts is an unlikely venue for a performer whose show is called “5 Octaves Off Broadway.”

But Arianna, a 22-year-old, light coloratura soprano from Anaheim who has more than a five-octave vocal range, gave it her all during a 45-minute show on the outdoor stage at Valley Fair 2000 at the Hansen Dam Equestrian Center in the far reaches of San Fernando Valley.

That, despite an audience that never numbered more than 19 at any one time. But it was a Friday afternoon, after all, a slow day at the fair.

Indeed, at one point, Arianna lost almost a third of her audience when a group of four got up to leave. They had a bus to catch. But to her credit, they left reluctantly, waving goodbye to the auburn-haired singer in the short black tube dress with a black shawl draped around her shoulders.

Arianna returned their waves as she launched into “My Heart Will Go On” from “Titanic,” which literally stopped the departing fair-goers dead in their tracks. The bus would have to wait.

That wouldn’t surprise Bill McClure, owner of McClure’s Bar and Grill, a Tustin nightclub where Arianna has been performing the second Saturday of the month since February. Live entertainment at the club typically runs from jazz to rhythm and blues--not Broadway show tunes and pop standards.

“She goes over very well,” said McClure, who discovered Arianna singing karaoke at his club one night. He sees a potentially bright future for the young singer, whose repertoire includes the title song from “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from “Funny Girl.”

“I think she could probably go into one of those Broadway shows,” McClure said. “She’s very theatrical and has the instrument to go with it.”

Like thousands of other talented young singers, Arianna’s ultimate dream is a career on Broadway.

It is, she readily concedes, an uphill battle--even with her impressive five-plus octave range. But Arianna is determined to do it--with the help of Joseph Tatner, her manager of five months.

Tatner created Arianna’s act, a two-hour show that includes lighting and fog effects, costume changes, and a sword fight. He has also increased her bookings and made it his mission to make producers, bookers and the media sit up and take notice.

Although a two-day, four-show gig at a country fair might not indicate it, Arianna’s singing career has been on an upswing since Tatner took over.

Her first CD, a self-produced collection of pop and operatic tunes called “Miracle,” will be released in August. That comes on the heels of Arianna’s first color poster. (Shot at the Mission Inn in Riverside, it shows her wearing a black and red gothic ball gown and holding a rose in front of a large oak door). The CD and poster will be sold at her shows and through her Web site, www.ariannausa.com.

Arianna has been booked into a three-date engagement--the first on Tuesday--at the Cinegrill in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the Hollywood Boulevard nightspot where Cybill Shepherd performed last month.

Says Cinegrill director J.D. Kessler, who normally books unknowns for only one night: “She’s got quite an extraordinary voice. Even though she’s a soprano and has a huge range, she has a quality that could very much be adapted to pop music.”

In June, the same month she appeared at the fair, Arianna had a personal audition with a casting director at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles for an understudy position in the current production of “James Joyce’s The Dead.”

And only a week before, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s personal secretary called to ask for Arianna’s press kit and demo tape to pass on to Webber’s musical director.

The movie version of “Phantom of the Opera” is being cast, and if there is any role Arianna yearns to play, it’s that of the young opera singer Christine.

“It’s one of those roles that, from the first time I heard it, I knew I had to do it,” she said.

Arianna credits her career strides to Tatner, 39, who, it turns out, is also her husband of eight months.

Not that they’re eager to let the word out.

Says she: “We don’t deny that we’re married, but we don’t advertise the fact either. It’s kind of to keep that whole ‘availability’ mystery as a performer.”

Says he: “The thing is if anybody thinks I’m her husband or boyfriend, they automatically think, ‘Oh, God, yeah, the husband.’ We don’t want to deal with that because they automatically assume I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Tatner, however, is no show-biz newcomer.

An Orange County native who grew up in Garden Grove and Anaheim, he is a former child actor-singer-dancer who landed small parts on “The Brady Bunch,” “The Partridge Family” and “Fame,” in addition to numerous commercials. He later had a fling in stand-up comedy but dropped out of show business about 15 years ago to go into the computer field.

Then, a year and a half ago, Tatner met Arianna through her mother, Lynda Williams, of Studio City. He heard Arianna sing for the first time when the three went to a karaoke bar in Corona.

“Her voice was, quite frankly, the most stunning thing I had ever heard, and she was only 20 when I met her,” Tatner said. “She popped off these high notes like there was nothing to them. There’s emotion and power in her voice, and she looked just so natural on stage--like she was born to be there.”

Dissatisfied with the lack of progress Arianna’s manager of two years was making, Tatner volunteered to take over managing her career. (He also sings a duet with her in her act--the title theme from “The Phanton of the Opera”--and does a sword fight with her during a special arrangement of “Man of La Mancha.”

It was Tatner’s suggestion that Arianna go by just one name a la Cher and Madonna. (Her real name is Elisabeth Williams, but she discovered another woman in Equity has the same name, so she began using Arianna as a first name--a sobriquet that fit with her penchant for singing arias.)

Singing comes naturally to her. Seated at an umbrella table before her first show at the fair, Arianna recalled that, while growing up in Corona, she always sang around the house and put on shows in the living room.

At age 4, she announced to her family, “I want to be a singer and an actress on the stage.” Her parents’ response: “That’s great, honey; get a real job.”

Her mother had majored in voice in college, but Arianna is not sure where her theatrical ambition came from. There’s no doubt it soared after she saw the 1982 movie-musical “Annie.”

“My mom says I went around for about three weeks and I wouldn’t answer to anything but Annie,” she recalled, laughing: “I sang ‘Tomorrow’ and drove everybody crazy.”

In first grade, she sang “Tomorrow” in the school talent show. “It was really the only song I knew,” she said. Afterward, “people were coming up to my mom and saying, ‘Who’s your voice teacher?’ Who’s your agent?’ And my mom’s going, ‘She just does this. We don’t want her to do it for real.’ ”

Arianna said she’s always been vocally “more advanced” for her age. “It really is a gift from God, quite frankly, and I’m thankful for it.”

By the time she was 12, she was into country music. But then she discovered “The Phantom of the Opera” and, she said, “that was it.” She played the two-disc CD set twice “and knew the whole thing by heart.

“I would literally come home from school every day, put that thing on the stereo and for two hours do the whole show in my living room.”

Arianna, who moved to Michigan with her mother in high school, made her professional debut at 16, when she played Mabel in “Pirates of Penzance” at a small repertory company near Detroit, where she also played Christine in a production of “The Phantom of the Opera.”

In a weird twist, Arianna discovered a few months ago she bears a striking resemblance to Christine Nilsson, the 19th century Swedish-born opera star upon whom Gaston Leroux based the character in his novel, “The Phantom of the Opera.” Arianna believes she may even be related to Nilsson, who shared the same last name as her great-grandmother and came from the same area of Sweden.

While in Michigan, the 1996 high school graduate briefly studied voice and ballet at the Center for Creative Studies, a performing arts college in Detroit and “auditioned for everything that I came across. But it’s Michigan; it’s not exactly Theater Central.”

So she moved back to Corona in late 1997 and continued auditioning. She even flew to New York in the fall of 1998 to audition for “The Phantom of the Opera.”

“It was the most frightening experience of my life,” she said, then laughed: “I was sick on the subway.”

Every six months, Equity requires that its members audition at an open casting call for all the major shows.

“So, there were over 200 women there. When you walk into something like that it doesn’t matter how good you are. You see all these other people and they’re all good. You have maybe two or three people that you’re looking at and you’re going, ‘Why did I think I could come here?’ It’s very intimidating.”

But Arianna isn’t discouraged by the odds.

“You have to really, really want this,” she said.

She does, and her husband-manager is doing everything he can to see she gets it.

“She is really on the verge,” Tatner said. “My goal is in two months that everybody know who she is.”

Tatner has no lack of promotional ideas. He wants to see Arianna’s name up in lights on Hollywood Boulevard.

“I’m going to do a living billboard where she christens the thing with a champagne bottle in the beginning and climbs up to it and starts singing with a wireless headset from the billboard itself.

“Of course,” he added, “her Web site will have as much publicity as we can get for it.”

Of course.

*

Arianna, Cinegrill, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 7000 Hollywood Blvd. 8 p.m. Tuesday. Also Aug. 6 and 24. $12. (323) 769-7273.