Melina Doolittle on 'American Idol.'
Taped in Los Angeles by 19 Prods. Executive producers, Nigel Lythgoe, Ken Warwick, Cecile Frot-Coutaz, Simon Fuller; director, Bruce Gowers.
Dedications created a hurdle as 19 of the 20 contestants started their songs a pinch wobbly after watching their prerecorded weepy tributes to parents, grandmas and their betrothed. Taking a less emotional approach, Melinda Doolittle dedicated her perf to her voice coach and stylist and delivered an audience-wowing version of "My Funny Valentine." Doolittle and Lakisha Jones continue to hold down the pole position as singers to beat.
By asking the singers to use their perfs to pay tribute to an important person in their lives, it resulted in an abundance of sentimental ballads from the women and a few curious choices from the guys. Why anyone would sing Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" for their parents is beyond me? And its highly likely Chris Richardson's grandmother does not own any Jason Mraz CDs; these guys just picked a song and made it fit the occasion. The women, for the most part, went more literal.
The judges, underwhelmed by the guys the week before, gave thumbs up to seven of the 10 male performances, while only four of the women completely wowed Randy, Paula and Simon. Were they to review the perfs after all 20, it's quite likely praise would have been reserved for four or five fellows and five gals; Sundance Head's "Mustang Sally" was mediocre bar band, Brandon Rogers turned a great song, "Time After Time," into drivel and Simon Cowell was dead on in critiquing Blake Lewis's "Virtual Insanity" by dissecting it into three blocks -- copycat at the start, original in the middle, tone troubles in the third.
Nothing, however, touched the flat and uninspired reading of "Steppin' Out With My Baby" turned in by the competition's weakest singer, Sunjaya Malakar. The judges trashed him -- Cowell accurately used the word "ghastly" -- and even Abdul struggled to come up with something. "Stay on pitch," she uttered, singing instruction akin to "color inside the lines."
When it came to the women, judges were harsher and in one instance, while they didn't say it, the trouble was not song selection, but portion of song selection. Jones sang "Midnight Train to Georgia," a tune that has three distinct musical sections and an argument could be made that there are actually four. Rather than find a start and end and sing through, Jones opted to cut down each block, which made for a pair of bumpy transitions. Leslie Hunt, generally seen as devoid of personality, gave the shortest performance of the night, singing the Nina Simone version of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley's "Feeling Good." It was straight, concise and pleasant -- and it may well get voted off.
Sabrina Sloan, to these ears, was an "AI" knockout. Cowell commented "don't confuse power with singing," which is accurate and yet amusing: Every singer who makes it into the final five gets right up against that line...and America responds in the affirmative when they hear big performances of big songs.
Meanwhile, they couldn't trash Alaina Alexander and Antonella Barba enough for their confused performances of songs too big for their voices. But one has to suspect America isn't ready to start voting off the cute girls just yet.
Running time: 3 HOURS.
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