I will admit that I missed the first sixteen minutes of the show this week because of the AFC Championship game and totally forgot that I’d never set up a series recording. So, during a commercial break, I switched over to NBC and started recording. Because of this, I received a good 15-minutes of abuse, including this gem by Tailgate Crashers’ own Mike Hulse: I forgive a lot of the cockamamie things you watch, but now you’re watching a crappy knockoff of a crappy show about casting a crappy musical based on a crappy movie.
Yes, pretty much… minus the whole “musical based on a movie” part. And that brings us to this week.
I come in sixteen minutes in during a sing off. All of the Dannys and Sandys were given two hours to learn a new song, if by “new” you mean “one of the songs that are in Grease and that all these people should have known cold by the time they got to Grease Academy.” The song is Tears on my Pillow. The gimmick: as they sing the song, David Ian will stalk around the room and touch people on the shoulder. If you are touched, you leave. At the end, 24 people will be left for a live performance in front of invited guests. I come in 36 hours before final eliminations, which means they compressed a full week of Grease Academy into sixteen minutes of airtime. With commercials, it must have been about 13 minutes.
The live performance starts with a quick ensemble dance piece with all 24 people. After the ensemble, it moves into groups of four performing a song together.
The first group sings the Jackson 5’s I’ll Be There. Oddly, they don’t show the whole song. The first group features Laura Osnes goes first and sounds very good. Ashley Anderson is second. I doubt she’s going to be a strong enough singer to go through. She’s very shaky. Kate Rockwell tries to be a bit too animated and doesn’t sound good to me. Juliana Hansen also doesn’t sound good to me.. Nothing I think that’s going to get through. Of group one, I’m going to guess only the first girl, Laura, gets through.
The second group (they don’t mention the name of the song and I don’t recognize it) starts with Max Crumm who, for whatever reason, showed up to a Grease audition with a mop haircut, but who probably has one of the best natural voices of the 12 guys. Derek Keeling has a great voice. Reed Prescott is way too nasaly and sounds very bad. Nathaniel Flatt does a falsetto that’s no good for me. Based on the little I see of this performance, Max and Derek go through.
The third group sings Avril Lavigne’s Complicated, which is an oddly good pick. Kelli La Valle, who we’re informed the judges are concerned about her age doesn’t do that well. She doesn’t have the oomph quite yet. Kathleen Monteleone is very good. These are the only two we get solos for. Kathleen goes through, Kelli does not. I have no idea about the others as we didn’t see them do a solo.
Group four includes Rockville Center’s own Matt Nolan. They do Jailhouse Rock by Elvis. How Matt Nolan is still in this baffles me. It’s entirely David Ian’s man-crush on him. George Pellegrino is easily the best of the group. Nick Dalton cracks through the thing, not good. Chad Doreck is no good. The judges seem fascinated with Matt so I assume he gets through. If I was doing this, George and Chad go through. I can’t imagine that they will put Matt through. They can’t open a Broadway show with him at his current level.
Group five does Don’t Want To Miss A Thing by Aerosmith. Kevin Green and Steven Calakos both sound average to good.. Austin Miller who is one of the few who actually SOUNDS like a Broadway singer. Jason Celeya also sounds average to good. This whole group is good. I would actually put all four through but I’m going to call Austin and Jason (more the look than the other two).
Group six sings True Colors by Cindy Lauper. Ashley Spencer is good. Cara Hille has a very monotone and static delivery. I don’t think she’s animated enough to go through. Lexi Rhoades and Allie Shultz both sound the same and both good. Lexi, Allie, and Ashley can go through from this group.
We get to the final cut portion of the show, with a little bit of the cutting process. People are brought up two at a time and told whether they are cut or moving on.
At the end we’re left with Max, Juliana, Derek, Laura, Chad, Kathleen, Kevin, Kate, Austin, Ashley, Jason, and Allie. Most of these I had and I’d take Austin and Kathleen as the early favorites.
Previews for next week promise Olivia Newton-John as a guest judge and a twist: “They think they’re the final 12, but ARE THEY??!?!?!”
OK, the bad. After almost three hours of awful audition shows, they compress the entire Grease Academy week, which they spent a huge part of the first two weeks pimping up, into one hour? We got hardly any of the training, any of the workout, or any of the choreography. Why even show it? And, still, it was the best episode of the season.
To top it off, we don’t even get full performances of the songs? The whole point of this show is to be a singing competition and we can’t even get six whole audition songs? The audience got one single line from each performer (if we were lucky) followed by the whole quartet singing. The audience barely got to form an opinion about any of the competitors. The entirety of the show was boiled down to these performances, and we saw nothing.
Next week promises to be the beginning of the live competition. I don’t know what their “they think they’re the final twelve” tease was, but it can’t be anything good. They picked the right twelve, don’t start getting cute. And, once people start voting, don’t start invalidating their voting or you lose the entire point of the show. Real television competitions can’t have Dusty Finishes or the purpose of the voting gets invalidated. I could see them doing some sort of “vote-in” for the cut people, but that’s it.
The meat of the show starts next week, finally. I’m looking forward to it.
