The right impression

What she does for a living is a little confusing.

To call her a female impersonator conjures an image of a broadshouldered figure in 7-inch heels, cascading wig and skin-tight dress lip-syncing to Cher or Madonna. But that’s actually a drag queen.

To say she is a female impressionist is to call her a painter.

Huntington Beach’s own Bethany Owens is a bona fide female impersonator, or rather, a female who does impersonations. They are often of Cher and Madonna, but that is beside the point.

That she is the only female anyone can think of doing this sort of work seems entirely the point.

“My challenge was to prove that a female can do this,” says her manager Jim Whirlow, who has worked with Owens to develop what is likely the world’s only one-woman show by a tribute artist. “Bethany Owens: The Woman of 1001 Voices and Faces” comes to the OC Pavillion Friday.

The show is the largest within the area Owens has booked, Whirlow says.

“Tribute artist” is Owens’ preferred job title, according to Whirlow.

“There are impressionists, impersonators and tribute artists,” he says. “The impressionists just do the voices — like Rich Little. Impersonators study the voice and mannerisms, and tribute artists do all of that and the whole costume.”

Owens was born in Kansas but moved to Huntington Beach at a young age, and graduated from Huntington Beach High School. A natural performer, she soon “got into a band situation,” says Whirlow. That meant she fronted a top-40 show band that traveled mostly to Las Vegas.

At some point, Owens began mimicking the classic television character Edith Bunker, to audiences that giggled their appreciation. “That’s where it started,” Whirlow says.

Soon Owens was adding more and more characters, like Cher and Barbra Streisand. “It got to where the guys [in the band] were jealous,” admits Whirlow. “She was getting more acclaim than the band.”

Owens has amassed a repertory of at least 300 voices, and with many of them, she combines the visual with the aural.

She begins her show in full dress as Marilyn Monroe, and before audiences’ eyes, she transitions into character after character through costume and wig changes. But those are secondary to her ability to transform herself through mannerisms.

The latest wave of electronic playthings is helping keep Owens working. She’s been hired to record a series of voice impressions, including Fran Drescher and Sharon Osborne, for downloadable cell phone ring tones and for GPS systems in car navigational instruments.

You might say the voices of Bethany Owens are ubiquitous, even though she has not yet been booked on late-night television.

“It’s just a matter of time,” says Whirlow. See her now before tickets are hard to come by.

Elizabeth Glazner

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IF YOU GO

WHAT: Bethany Owen in “One Voice”

WHERE: The OC Pavilion Performing Arts Theatre, 801 N. Main Street in Santa Ana, 92701

WHEN: Friday at 8 p.m. (doors open at 5 p.m.)

COST: $25 - $35

INFO: (714) 550-0880 or www.ocpavilion.com for tickets; www.bethanyowen.net