Whitney Houston was under water and apparently unconscious when she was found in a hotel bathtub, Beverly Hills police said Monday.On a cruise ship, former Fort Wayne resident Brahm Sheray found not love, but Elvis.
Also Madonna, Michael Jackson and Buddy Holly.
In short, he found his calling.
For 13 years, Sheray has been the music director for Legends in Concert, aka On Stage Entertainment.
The company specializes in musical mimics – impersonators whose performances are virtually indistinguishable from those of the pop and rock stars they imitate.
Sheray will return to his hometown with the first true touring show that Legends in Concert has ever produced and the first devoted to a single artist.
"The Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artists Tour," coming to Embassy Theatre tonight, features four Elvis Presley impersonators, including former welder Bill Cherry, winner of the 2009 Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artists Contest.
Each impersonator in "The Ultimate Elvis" represents a different era in Presley’s career: the ’50s, the movie years, the ’68 comeback special and the ’70s concert years.
There’s even a woman named Lori Russo who does an impersonation of Ann-Margret.
"She’s great," says Kevin Mills, the New Jersey native who portrays the movie-era Presley. "I worked with her 12 years ago in Atlantic City. She’s amazing. She looks like Ann-Margret and sounds like Ann-Margret. She has the same mannerisms."
When Sheray graduated from the Cincinnati Conservatory in the mid-’90s, he had no idea that he was going to spend most of the next decade and a half on tribute acts (that aforementioned cruise ship gig was what hooked him up with Legends in Concert). But he says it has been immensely rewarding.
On any given night, Sheray says, he has to front a band that must do a credible job of backing Jackson, Frank Sinatra and Dolly Parton.
Sheray says the standard Legends in Concert show features a half-dozen tribute artists.
"Just about anyone you can possibly imagine," he says.
Unlike a lot of touring theatrical shows that consist of a bunch of one-nighters in different cities, a typical Legends in Concert show sets up shop in a casino and stays there for three months.
"I actually feel like I have lived in St. Louis for a while," Sheray says. "I can talk about St. Louis to anybody who was born and raised there."
Of course, the Ultimate Elvis is not the typical Legends in Concert show.
"It’s a real departure for me," says Sheray, making reference to overnights on a tour bus and 4 a.m. wake-up calls.
Sheray says he still keeps "a foot in the jazz and rock worlds."
His grandmother, Leah Tourkow, who hosts a Wednesday night jazz show on WBOI-FM 89.1, was the one who got him interested in jazz as a child by "dragging (him) around" to various concerts in the area.
By the time he was 17, Sheray had performed in a number of musical contexts, often at establishments that he was not legally allowed to be in.
Sheray, whose wife is expecting the couple’s first child in July, says he has a lot of friends and family members in the area who are coming to "The Ultimate Elvis."
"I called my mom to see how many (free tickets) she’d need and she said, ‘We already bought them,’ " Sheray says. "I said, ‘Mom, why did you do that?’ And she said, ‘We all want to sit together and we know where we want to sit.’ "
