It only started its third season last week and already “The X Factor” is winding up its auditions. Why not? It doesn’t have revolving chairs or even an identifiable method of working through audition cities.
Instead, it jumps all around geographically, sometimes singer to singer, changing locales as judges change clothes — and Simon occasionally puts on wire rimmed glasses, a new accessory for him.
And the auditions feel more like a clip reel than an actual audition session. No wonder not even all of the judges show up.
Simon Cowell was gone for one big audition Wednesday, and for another, both Demi Lovato and Paulina Rubio were missing, leaving just Simon and Kelly Rowland, who got two weird obsessives proclaiming love to her in one night.
By now, it’s obvious from each buildup whether the singer is going to be any good or not.
The first one on the show, Melanie Wright, 49, a paralegal from Crofton, MD, matched her velvet gloves to her sparkly dress and spoke about her dreams in what could have been one of the better introductory lines of the night: “I’ve been waiting 43 ears for a moment like this.”
Instead of that “Idol” anthem, though, she did the overwrought dance track “Titanium” by David Guetta. It was terrible, but they let her go on and on, as if this kind of thing is the least bit entertaining any more.
Next up, a Ukranian dentist from Queens, who butchered Celine Dion’s “I’m Your Lady” just so Simon could quip “As a dentist, you know what it’s like to deliver pain to people.”
Then a 55 year old stooge who looked like Curly with a Moe wig (why do these guys always do “Born to Be Wild?”).
Weird to start the show with five straight terrible singers, but here they were, with a substitute teacher singing “The Final Countdown” and sounding like an alien, according to Simon, then Ruben Gloria, a flamboyant New York mail clerk in a tiger suit singing “Like a Virgin” in a high pitched voice.
And yet he wasn’t the only young man with a comically high voice auditioning but not being treated like the cartoon voices that they were (Simon suggested the truly weird and possibly deeply troubled Joseph Tolve of Mahopac, NY that he should be “on a Sesame Street type of show”).
It turned out that it didn’t matter that one or two judges failed to show up for various auditions, since the votes of the panel are always unanimous one way or another. Producers have advanced acts that are so either obviously great or so obviously terrible that there’s no in-between, and hence, never any deliberation among the judges. They’re hardly needed.
And yet, of those who were approved to go on, almost all of them were complimented first not by their vocal talents but how cute they were. Hence there was advancement by a couple of “unpolished” and not really that good pop stars in 15-year-olds, Emery Kelly and Khaya Cohen, whose real talent, judges failed to note, was her poise when she was asked to stop her first song and sing instead another.
Of the manly men who sang but didn’t sound like cartoon characters, returning auditioner James Kenney, who defined his apartment superintendent job as one mostly fixing toilets, wowed them with a blissed out “Summertime.” Football player turned bouncer Isaac Toeffa advanced as did 17 year old songwriter Chase Goehring.
But when former baseball player David Gray came up to sing in an odd way to show support for his girlfriend who also auditioned, he was just terrible. Then he came back and wrecked his girlfriend’s better but still not passable audition by proposing to her on stage. The female judges were more than charmed; Simon just tolerated it all.
But it may have been a big deal in reality show history: Such proposals don’t come quite so easily on shows built around them, like “The Bachelor,” let alone the first two weeks of a singing competition.
One of the changes to the show this year may have been a “Secret Song” in the style of the Secret Word on Groucho Marx’s old show. Sing it and you automatically advance. If that was the case (though no duck descended to confirm it), the secret song was Mary J. Blige’s “I’m Going Down.” Blending the performances of three different people who chose it, Allison Davis, Isabel Requena and teenager Isaiah Alston, seemed unfair to each of them. But they did all advance.
Of the creepy Kelly Rowland stalkers put on stage to stare at her as they sung, Wesley Mountain advanced while the overconfident Rickey Clark Jr., did not (but he did get Kelly to chase after him and dry his tears, which Mountain probably would have preferred).
Late in the show, a female pro football player Lorie Moore looked like a contender at the microphone too with a rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Who Have Nothing.”
Tim Olstad, 23, a waiter from Minnesota, seemed too nervous and boring to be a good candidate, but then melted hearts with his version of Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years.”
The show closed with a kind of novelty from a female-dominated duo called Second Hand High – a rapid-fire rap about “(You Better) Ask Me to Dance” that had Rowland up and dancing but ultimately saying no. Judges wanted it both ways – rejecting the duo but stealing their dumb but catchy song so they could do their own video version.
Oddly, all four judges showed up for that.
Thursday, they’ll fit in a few more auditions before the one hour episode closes with producers’ assignments of which judge will be coaching the boys, girls, over 25s and groups.
Next week already they’ll be divided and ready to perform in a battle round that looks like a clear ripoff of “The Voice” — “a four chair challenge” that promises to “change television challenges forever.”
If only.