It wasn’t until they got out of high school that one performer took to the stage.
“Musical theatre is my home and heart,” Tyree Corfe said. “I never touched anything theatrical until university and that’s because I didn’t think I was allowed to do boy roles and I didn’t want to do girl roles. I wasn’t that into interpreting those characters.”
In their first year at UNBC the university had a drama club and a musical club. The drama club was presenting Peter Pan and Wendy in September 2017.
“And one of my friends was auditioning,” Corfe said, who came from Langley to attend UNBC.
“She was auditioning for Peter Pan and I said I was going to audition for Peter as well just to keep her on her toes and I got the role of John and it was a ton of fun.”
Corfe always had lots of friends in musical theatre in high school and would attend the shows to support them.
So when they attended UNBC to study English and archeology that supportive effort continued. When the musical theatre group presented Young Frankenstein in 2017 they attended.
“So I went to the last show, which is always like the craziest show and when the shows were presented in Canfor Theatre that was when they would do the big joke show and there would be a couple of pranks go off but we don’t do that anymore because we’re in professional spaces,” Corfe said.
“But it was like the most fun I had ever had going to a show.”
The next year Corfe auditioned for Into the Woods and for Cinderella’s Prince.
“And that was the most fun I had ever had,” they recalled.
“So I just stuck with the club year after year.”
Anything Goes was their latest production but there was another element in the entertainment world that was calling to Corfe.
“And gender identity does play into it,” Corfe said. “So I had always known I was trans, probably as early as three or four. My brother and sister told me that I literally told them that I was a boy born into a girl’s body. So it’s just something that I have always known but had never knew that my experience was an actual thing.”
Corfe said they were more interested in transitioning after high school.
“So when I reached university that was when I was like ‘OK, nobody knows me,’” Corfe said.
“So I dropped myself hard into Prince George where nobody knew me and that was one of the best experiences of reinventing myself and being the most authentic version of myself. So that’s when I started identifying differently and that’s when I knew I wanted to be on hormones and I wanted to do at least a top surgery. And then that’s when I had cut my hair all off and actively dressed how I wanted to dress.”
During each summer Corfe really got into dressing in '50s era clothing.
“Love the retro thing,” Corfe said. “I really liked that culture and I don’t like sleeves so I was always rolling my sleeves and I really like Elvis’s fashion.”
Corfe’s first exposure to Elvis Presley took place when they were a child and their grandfather had a plumbing business he operated out of the family home.
“The secretary, her name was Loretta, she’d babysit me and sometimes I would go to her house and she had everything Elvis,” Corfe said.
“So that was my first time seeing Elvis as a really big figure.”
When Corfe was 14 they visited family in Memphis and they went to Graceland and visited Beale Street.
“I was super into art growing up so I remember taking lots of pictures but at that time I wasn’t really that into Elvis,” Corfe said.
“When things really heated up was in 2022 when I did Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and Melissa Glover of Theatre NorthWest saw me perform.”
Corfe was invited to perform in A Midsummer Night's Dream, part of Shakespeare in the Orchard.
Corfe played the amorous Lysander character and the play was set in the '50s.
One of the other cast members was connected to an Elvis impersonator and brought up the fact that there is an annual Penticton Elvis Festival.
“So when she told me about that I was kind of interested in going,” Corfe said.
“And at that time Elvis music became super interesting to me. A big part of that was that I had started hormones in 2020 and my voice dropped way lower than I expected and that kind of super-influenced my feelings towards musicals because contemporary musicals hate a man with a low voice.”
Corfe talked about preferring roles of a romantic nature, nothing dark and dramatic that seems to be the only type of role a lower register is suited for these days in musical theatre.
“I don’t wanna to be the old man in a show,” Corfe said.
So that’s when Corfe decided to explore classical musical theatre productions like No, No Nanette.
“Then I am allowed to have a low voice in a show without being the old guy,” Corfe said.
During the next school semester Corfe had participated in a local drag show and had sung as an Elvis tribute artist.
That next year Corfe graduated from university and had gone down to Vancouver.
“That's when I went to Elvis Festival — it was a family trip for me with my mom and sister,” Corfe said.
When Corfe attended Elvis Festival in 2023 they dressed up for it.
“I met a lot of the Elvis tribute artists and because I was dressed up for it people started asking me when I was going to compete and I said ‘I guess next year’,” Corfe smiled, recalling how friendly everyone was at the competition.
And that’s when things started ramping up.
Corfe took on the role of Elvis in Kat Fullerton’s Legends Live shows where Kat is Almost Marilyn, Audrey Layne is Basically Britney, Julie MacQueen is Likely Gaga, Lily Duff is Authentically Adele and Corfe is Pelvis.
“All that kind of helped gear up for competing at Elvis Festival in Penticton,” Corfe said.
The festival is set up for each competitor to sing two songs on Friday and Saturday, they explained. Then they can participate in the morning Gospel Show and sing two songs that are not part of the competition and then if the competitor scores high enough on Friday and Saturday they are in the Sunday night finale.
“So I had scored high enough to make it to the finale,” Corfe said.
They drew straws to determine the order of the competitors' performances.
“And I feel like it was divine providence that saw me draw the straw to perform last in the non-pros category,” Corfe said.
“So I got to close out the show.”
Corfe never had a clue where they might place during the competition so their approach when it came to song choice might’ve been different than a seasoned competitor.
“So I decided to sing all the songs I thought were cool and fun so I honed in on the super classic '50s Elvis songs that I really loved,” Corfe explained.
“They kind of come out as weirdo songs to do for Elvis Festival so I did Chuck Berry’s Maybellene because Elvis sang it during this one concert because you can essentially sing any song Elvis has sung and sometimes you don’t even know or realize he’s sung it.”
Worldwide there are 20 Elvis Presley Enterprises sanctioned events where Elvis tribute artists can qualify to compete in the Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist Contest to be crowned the king in Memphis in August.
Corfe pulled out all the stops during last year’s Penticton competition.
“At that point I was the first person crawling on stage and people went extra crazy for it,” Corfe said.
“And I made it to the finale with under a year of experience.”
Corfe sang Milk Cow Blues Boogie, a little-known song Elvis.
“It’s such a fun song that’s very hokey, old school, and Elvis started it off really slow and then he says ‘no, that don’t move me’ and then he did a sped up version and it’s probably one of his highest songs and it was tricky to find the right backing track and then I did Trouble, which I was a lot more comfortable with,” Corfe recalled.
“It was really awesome doing those songs and I was pretty happy with my performance and even when I stumbled a little bit everybody was there to support me and that was in front of an audience of about 3,000 people.”
Corfe came second in the Penticton Elvis Festival last year and will return to compete this year from June 27 to 29.
Corfe does the research on their fellow competitors and knows there will be some tough competition for them this year. Once they win a non-pro contest they are then considered a pro and can’t compete as a non-pro again so Corfe takes a philosophical approach heading into the competition.
“I will place where I am meant to place,’ Corfe said.
For more information about the Penticton Elvis Festival visit https://www.pentictonelvisfestival.ca/
