GUSHY FANGIRL THOUGH I MAY BE, I WILL CONTINUE TO LAVISH SNARK UPON THE DANCING POP TART: Having attended the SYTYCD tour last season, I considered myself to be something of an expert on 19 Entertainment's modus operandi for follow-on events. So I was a little surprised last night to find that the American Idol tour is a very different beast. Maybe it's a difference in mission -- the SYTYCD tour is pretty clearly just an opportunity to see your favorite dancers do all the good dances live on stage before they all return to whatever dancers do when they're not hugging Cat Deeley on live TV. And so this is what I expected from last night's AI event -- sort of a live greatest hits compilation from the season.
Instead, we watched ten mini-sets from each of the top ten performers -- three songs each (except that YDA got four and David Cook got five) -- with no additional structure except for an AI Gives Back performance from #5-10 right before intermission and a brief, seriously cheesy group sing at the end. Variety sees the AI tour as a post-show audition -- one last chance for the top ten to convince the fans that they should want to buy whatever albums they might subsequently release. As someone whose frequency of music purchases falls somewhere between "rarely" and "never," this notion was kind of lost on me. I don't care what kind of artist Syesha Mercado hopes to become -- I do want to see the performances I enjoyed on the show.
And so, the highlights, midlights, and nolights. (Here is a set list, if you care.)
Ouch: (1) In a class by herself, Ramiele Malubay. Perfunctory choreography, songs she'd never performed on the show, and a voice that cannot penetrate the background noise of fifteen thousand screaming David Archuleta fans. (2) The "Don't Stop the Music" group performance ending the show. Eek. I will never speak of this again. (3) Five or more (I lost count) of the performers announcing that their second number would be a slow song by saying "let's slow it down a little." What is this, a giant Purple Haze-DJ'ed record hop? Patter, people, patter!
Meh: Kristy Lee Cook. No one has trained her out of that swaying-kind-of-like-she's-on-her-beloved-ex-horse stance that characterized her performances throughout the show. And hm, she sings God Bless the USA second, but she's sitting down throughout . . . I wonder why . . . oh, wait, of course, she stands up on the "stand up!" line! Minus-ten for the choreographers, all of whom must be working on that other 19 Entertainment show.
Fine if not inspiring: (1) Brooke White. Wisely, she has chosen three songs involving instruments, so we don't need to see Brookie try to dance. Two pianos, a guitar, and no shoes. Bonus points for having Brooke at the piano rise from the floor -- clearly the Nassau Coliseum knows how to make a piano rise from the floor, as the Billy Joel "9 sold out shows -- 1998" banner hanging from the ceiling proves beyond a doubt. (2) Clifford the Crunchy Muppet. Has Leonard Cohen suddenly decided that people are no longer permitted to cover his songs? Inexplicably, there was no "Hallelujah" in the muppet's set. There was, however, a ukulele (give you one guess which song), as well as two guitar performances -- another wise choice not to fly solo without an instrument to hide behind. (3) Syesha Mercado. She hit her stride on the show as a Broadway performer, and now she's back to lower rent Whitney. (4) Chikezie. I think I'm not giving him full credit here, as I think he did a nice job, but as the #10 finisher, he led off the show and so I was confused as to what the format was supposed to be. Sometimes real life needs TiVo.
Solid: Carly Smithson. For some reason, the live arena setting highlighted the quality of her voice -- especially the upper part of her range -- in a way that televison didn't. (Oh, and by the way, arena rock is called arena rock because it definitely sounds better in arenas than other music does.) I still don't think that her #6 finish was a travesty of justice -- anything in the 4-6 range is more or less the same thing -- given that while her voice is great, her charisma is somewhat less so. This is as good a place as any to note that one of the unexpected aspects of the show was the display of cleavage. Apparently the tour takes a more generous view of decolletage than Fox does, and both Carly and Syesha took full advantage of the situation.
Wuz Robbed: Michael Johns. Did he really only finish eighth? Those who view the tour as a chance to see what the singers will do as artists probably disagree with me, but Michael Johns was one of the highlights of the show. He was one of the very few performers who really knew how to work the arena; he chose songs that the crowd was excited to hear; and he sang them well -- including the big Steven Tyler notes at the end of "Dream On" that were lopped off from his TV performance. Johns also gets the notion of patter, bless his heart -- unlike most of his fellow performers, who swallowed most of whatever they were trying to say between songs, Johns was comfortable and entertaining on stage. While Johns did get a nice showy bit during the AI Gives Back group sing, I wish there had been room in this format for a reprise of the fantastic bluesy Johns/Smithson "The Letter" from the season finale.
And then there were Davids. Walking around before the show, you couldn't take three steps without tripping over some 8-12 year old girl wearing either a tour shirt from the night before or a hand-made t-shirt saying something like "U Rock D. Cook!!!!!" And when the smoke machine got cranked up after Syesha introduced YDA (he's the only person who got to use the smoke machine - wonder if it's in his contract?), the screeches from that 8-12 crowd were positively deafening. Pre-teen girls can shriek at a pitch that no other segment of the human population can achieve. Ow.
So anyway, YDA got the full piano-ascending-from-the-depths treatment plus bonus smoke machine, and when the smoke cleared and the music started, guess what? Yep, he's still got those dead, dead eyes. Not that this bothered the the Nassau County elementary school crowd, which was going positively apeshit by the time YDA got to his third song ("Stand By Me," which even I must admit he sang really well). Somewhere in the middle of YDA's set, Mr. Cosmo poked me and said "hey, look at all the screens." From our vantage point way up in the nosebleeds, we had a great view of the hundreds of people filming the performance from their cell phones and digital cameras -- the glow of all of those LCD screens in the darkness is apparently the lighter for a new millennium of concertgoers.
Now doesn't this seem like an awfully long post without any mention of David Cook? That's because it was an awfully long stretch of time between Chikezie's opening number a couple of hours earlier and the moment at which David Cook finally appeared on the stage. (Which was the core ridiculousness of this format -- fortunately, the fact that Michael Johns and Carly Smithson got booted relatively early saved the first act from a serious case of the monotonies.) But I wanted to come to this concert solely because David Cook proved that all was right with the universe when he triumphed over YDA and his dead, dead eyes, and the fact that it took two hours to get the guy on stage is the most serious flaw of this production.
(A lesser flaw was the fact that when he finally did get onto the stage, it was clear that the makeup artist had gone a little heavy on the eyeliner --or else the makeup had been applied back when Kristy Lee was working her Stand Up! choreography and then he'd taken an extended nap without reapplying his makeup upon awakening.)
The performance, though? Really, really good. I can (and just did!) nit-pick with the best of them, but there is a core sincerity and joy to David Cook that makes him a pleasure to watch. Unlike, say, a YDA, who has spent his short life being groomed to perform with a cadre of Mousekedancers behind him, Cook comes across like someone who never thought anything like this could possibly happen to him and who is grateful for every moment of it. Not to mention the fact that the guy can sing his ass off. Mr. Cosmo and I have often discussed the fact that AI winners seem to develop a certain star quality after winning the show (see, e.g., Carrie Underwood, and that incredible performance of "Last Name" last season on the show), and Cook is no exception. Taken as a whole, the show felt like a David Cook concert (which, incidentally, included the non-truncated versions of both "Hello" and "Billie Jean") with nine opening acts.
I know we like to be snarky around here, but let me just say this: for the first time in seven seasons, I have cared about who won American Idol, and so I feel comfortable being a little bit gushy about the fact that I am happy to have seen David Cook perform on stage as a part of this tour. America totally got this one right.
(Oh, and yes, I have bought my tickets for the SYTYCD tour this fall at -- guess where -- the Nassau Coliseum. Stay tuned.)
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