Tisch alumna Christina Bianco garnered over six million views on YouTube last year for her celebrity impersonation cover of “Let It Go” from the movie “Frozen.” Now, the multitalented actress is starring in the one-woman play, “Application Pending,” at the intimate Westside Theatre. In this comedy, Bianco plays 42 characters in the span of 70 minutes, ranging from a babbling preschool boy to the vicious boss Dr. Bradshaw. WSN spoke with Bianco in an interview to discuss her time as an NYU student and her process for developing her multiple roles.

Bianco graduated high school in three years, so she was only a junior in high school when she was accepted to study musical theater at NYU. As a high schooler, she took a full college course load, and was able to pursue her creative interests quickly. Growing up just outside of New York City, Bianco spent a lot of time in the city and knew that she wanted to study at NYU.

“I wanted to learn and to be in the thick of it,” she said of studying theater in New York City.

At the time, Tisch’s musical theater program was called CAP21, which Bianco studied while also pursuing a broadcast journalism major. 

“I don’t subscribe to doing one program,” Bianco said.

It was only while at Tisch that people started telling Bianco that she had a knack for impersonations.   

“That’s really good, you do a really good so-and-so,” Bianco recalled classmates telling her.

She especially succeeded in accents and dialects class, picking up on nuances of different accents and sounds easily. Although she admits to being completely lost in a voice and speech class, where the International Phonetic Alphabet mystified her.

“How are you supposed to learn accents?” Bianco questioned. “I didn’t know the symbols, but boy I could say it correctly. I got away with murder.”

However, the revelation that Bianco excelled at impersonations occurred to her when she joined the cast of “Forbidden Broadway,” an Off-Broadway performance parodying musical theater. After seeing an ad for the show, Bianco decided to audition for a role, locking herself in her apartment to practice various impersonations. The first impersonation she could do was of Bernadette Peters. 

“I called up my mom and was like, ‘Who does this sound like?’” Bianco said. 

“You always did this, but I didn’t know you could really do this,” Bianco recalled her mother said.

With “Application Pending,” the creators Greg Edwards and Andy Sandberg chose voices they thought supported the characters in the play, but creating the impersonations proved to be an evolving process for Bianco.

“What works on a page may not be physically possible,” Bianco said of the trial-and-error process.

The memorization component of “Application Pending” was something that Bianco had never encountered before, as her previous methods did not work.

“Nothing was applicable,” she said. “I had to start from scratch.” 

On the set of “Application Pending,” Bianco placed post-it notes to remember the order of calls during the play’s hardest stretch, acting as mental triggers to keep Bianco focused.

Although some characters have multiple phone calls through which she can develop their personalities, others have only one quick call for Bianco to convey a character who she intimately knows.  Even though the audience doesn’t know some of the characters names, Christina knows them, their backstories and their motivations.

“Application Pending” runs through April 19. 

A version of this article appeared in the Thursday, March 5 print edition. Email Caroline Cunfer at [email protected]