Recently in Over the Rainbow Category

A review of the final shows is coming from me, but in the meantime there’s a performance (above) from Danielle Hope, winner of Over the Rainbow.

Appearing on ITV1’s This Morning, Danielle told Phillip and Fearne:

My head was all over the place and I think it was really coming from the heart [when I sang after winning] - everything just happened so fast and I was in this state of shock. But it was an incredible feeling.

Of the forthcoming production of The Wizard of Oz, due to open in 2011 at the London Palladium:

We obviously can’t start rehearsals until we’ve got a cast, so we need to cast that, which I’m really excited about as it’s a big ensemble piece and that’s an important part of the show, and they become like family don’t they? I think we start rehearsals around December. But we should have the cast recording around September(ish).

On Twitter, I noticed a number of people wondering how those ruby slippers, which been encased in a glass dome beside Andrew’s chair throughout the run, managed to fit the winner so perfectly. As it turns out, they didn’t.

They don’t fit me. What they had to do, because they had no idea who was going to win and it was a live show, they had to average all the girls’ sizes. The average was a four and I’m a six.

Lauren and Step had size 3’s… but I squeezed my feet into those - I think the adrenaline carried me through.

Danielle’s single of Over the Rainbow, which is being sold in aid of the BBC Performing Arts Fund and Prostate UK, is now available to download from either Amazon.co.uk or iTunes.

And you’ll be able to read Danielle’s interview with our broadcasting correspondent Matthew Hemley in this week’s (May 27) issue of The Stage.

Do you think you could sing Over the Rainbow better than Danielle? Maybe Defying Gravity is more your thing. Men, could you tackle Maria or Oh, What a Beautiful Morning? Get over to our Musical Voice competition, sign up with PureSolo, submit your entry and you could be singing on a CD of musical theatre classics! For more, see www.thestage.co.uk/musicalvoice

I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re happy, girls. I hope you’re proud how you would grovel in submission to feed your own ambition. But really, you think singing Defying Gravity that badly is going to help you win the role of Dorothy?

It was a poor start for musicals week — and, not for the first time this series, I’m left wondering at the irony that a show nominally discovering musical theatre talent should feel the need to relegate the selfsame subject matter to a transient theme.

Part of the problem with the group number, I think, is that Defying Gravity is principally a character showcase for the role of Elphaba, with occasional interjections by Glinda. It’s not a song suited to a chorus.

So here, when we have six girls coming tantalisingly close to the final in two weeks’ time, there seemed to be an element of individual characterisation that meant half-singing, half-shouting lines. It may have sounded fine when Idina Menzel did it. It might even have worked if the same technique was used as any one of the Dorothys’ solos. But six voices all doing the same thing at once? Not good on the ears.

Incidentally, if you’re entering The Stage/PureSolo Musical Voice competition, which I’m helping to judge alongside How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? runner-up Helena Blackman and record company executive Rick Clark, Defying Gravity is one of the songs you can choose. Listen to the group performance for tips on how NOT to impress a judge…

On to the solo numbers, and Danielle got this week’s “Previously on Glee” moment, as she sang On My Own from Les Miserables. I thought she started quite well, the endearing qualities of her voice working to good advantage in the song’s quieter opening verses. Unfortunately, as the song’s crescendo took effect, she lost control in spectacular fashion, producing some deeply unpleasant screeching. The sweetness to her voice didn’t really get back into her voice until the closing segment.

A change of pace for Jessica and her rendition of Mary Poppins’ Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. The producers do like giving Jessica lots of movement routines, probably with good reason — she does tend to cope with the movement better than some of her rivals. What she delivers in exuberance, though, she often loses in vocal control. Quite often the pitching went sharp, and we lost the odd word as she caught her breath. And her final note was just excruciating, as it struggled to settle.

Steph’s number, Somewhere from West Side Story, has a massive dynamic range, from quiet and almost internal to those classic, Streisand-worthy belting notes. It can be tough to judge the progression through the song, but I think Steph just about managed it. Her voice broke a little near the end, but not in a way that detracted from the power and character of the song. It won’t go down as one of the best deliveries of the number and nor was it one of Steph’s best — but it was solid and, after being in the sing-off for the second time last week, proved that Andrew was justified in saving her.

Following Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics set to Leonard Bernstein’s music, Jenny was given another Sondheim classic, Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music. A difficult song from a young girl to sing, as it was written to be sung by an older actress. As such, we would require from Jenny the impression that she had a life to look back on and regret, and sad to say I don’t feel we really got that from her. It’s also hard to believe that she is contemplating her life when she stares down the barrel of the camera. Apart from the acting side of the performance, it was one of the stronger vocal lines.

Sophie had the least well-known song of all the solos, performing I Love Being a Girl from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Girl, a musical now rarely performed thanks in part to its outdated portrayal of Asian immigrants. The song itself had a life beyond the musical thanks to the likes of Doris Day and Peggy Lee turning it into a cabaret number, but here it was taken back to its roots. But the song really needs quite a delicate vocal, and at this stage I think Sophie’s voice is just demonstrating that it just doesn’t quite have that quality. In such an unashamedly girly song, I’d also expect her movement across the stage to be light and full of air, but if anything it felt the opposite. Sophie’s had worse performances, it’s true, but this just didn’t leap out as a particularly good one overall.

The final solo number was another Sondheim classic, with Lauren delivering Being Alive from Company (how about, in the next series if there is one, every week features musical numbers and we have a Sondheim week? Just a thought). And if you closed your eyes, it was one of the best vocals Lauren has given, which places it above what most of the other girls in this competition are capable of. However, in terms of the whole package I continue to struggle with how she comes across while performing. I find it almost impossible to like her while she’s singing. While I’ve never met Lauren, we do have friends in common and I know she’s lovely in person, but on stage I just find her performance a little too clinical for my liking.

WIth a double elimination in the offing, it came as a bit of a shock to realise that the solo numbers had finished less than halfway through the Saturday show.

The fallout over the interruption of the climax of a Doctor Who episode with an animated trail promoting Over the Rainbow has, at least, seen some positive effects.

As quoted on the letters page of the new (May 8-14) issue of Radio Times, a spokesman for the BBC says that the type of overlay used may sometimes be seen at the end of entertainment shows, but not dramas. In this instance, it appears that the overlay was run 20 seconds too early — it should have, instead, been played over the credits as an alternative to that annoying “shrinking”.

The BBC says they are “taking steps to ensure this mistake will not happen again”. Meanwhile, in last night’s edition of The Graham Norton Show, with guest Karen Gillan (Doctor Who’s Amy Pond), Graham dealt with the intrusion in his opening monologue:

Well. That was an exciting one, and no mistake. Not least because of the final result — but before then, we were treated to a higher than average number of brilliant performances.

All in all, it was the perfect week to make my first visit to Fountain Studios, the home of the Over the Rainbow shows. The nice people from the BBC and TalkbackThames had reserved seats for my guest and I on the balcony at the left of the stage, almost directly opposite Andrew and the panel. These turned out to be some of the best seats in the house — unlike most of the audience, it’s very rare that the view of any onstage performance is obstructed by cameras,

And that meant that we could see all the flaws that a selectively directed TV performance sometimes omits — most noticeably in the group numbers.

But more of that anon. On with the review of all the performances, brought to you by the blog that the Dorothys themselves read, no less. Even if it is, as one commenter on Digital Spy reckons, “highly questionable, listen to me, you know I know best kind of rubbish, characterised by a lack of anything remotely human or appealing”.

For more inhuman rubbish, join me after the jump.

And so the fourth weekend opened with If I Only Had a Heart, cunningly changed to If I Only Had the Part for the girls (plus a gender change in the first couple of lines). As a conceit it worked quite well, although the individual line performances showed up some of the same weaknesses that we saw in last week’s show. In particular I thought Emilie and Danielle could have done a lot better, and it sounded like several of the girls hadn’t fully warmed up.

But it tends to be the solo performances that count. First of the block, Jenny sang Duffy’s Warwick Avenue. There is such a beautiful tone to Jenny’s voice that I think she’d make a great pop singer, but she doesn’t really push the theatricality of the song to any great extent, which is why I think the judges are being harsher on her than she maybe deserves.

Next up, Emilie, massacring Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper. And a truly horrendous performance it was, an out of key caterwauling backed up by some excruciatingly bad acting - one minute sulky toddler, the next a hyperactive infant who’s just found the contents of Mummy’s special tablets drawer. The judges pulled their punches slightly, maybe for fear of setting off more waterworks and allowing Emilie through for another week on the sympathy vote.

Stephanie’s rendition of Carly Simon’s Nobody Does it Better was great. Another girl with a great voice and a good command of the stage. After last week’s supposed choreography week, where she blew the others out of the water wit the strength of her dancing in her solo, it was a more sedate performance this week, but still strong. I do find the slight lateral lisp she has on her ‘s’ sounds while singing a minor irritation — but to be honest, if Lee Mead can win and go on to great things with a similar sound to his voice, who am I to argue? Charlotte thought that, at times, her phrasing was a bit too “sing-y”. Apparently a bad thing in a song. Who knew?

This Saturday, BBC1 launched a new series of themed idents. Unusually for the channel, the ident is a cartoon animation: even more unusually it includes references to the channel’s current slate of Saturday evening shows Total Wipeout, Doctor Who and Over the Rainbow.

Outside Christmastime, it’s rare for BBC1 shows to turn up in the idents themselves. One exception has been the cast and car of Ashes to Ashes, who turned up in a live action ident, but generally the short films are generic in quality.

I like the conceit of the new idents: they imply a cohesiveness to the Saturday night schedule that ITV, for all the popularity of Britain’s Got Talent, lacks. And the use of the iconic Television Centre to provide the circular motif that is common to all BBC1 idents is both an appropriate choice and one that appeals to the TV geek in me.

So the launch of the idents should have been a success on Saturday night. Instead, a particularly stupid and thoughtless application of the new Saturday night branding turned all the positives into one almighty negative.

First off, apologies for the extreme tardiness of this week’s round up. It’s been busy busy busy here at Stage towers. Among other things, we’ve been setting up our own search for a musical theatre voice in assoication with PureSolo and Silva Screen records. But it’s mostly because I’ve been writing lots more print features than usual. Normal service should be resumed from hereon in!

This week’s show opened up with Ease on Down the Road from the 1975 African-American version of The Wizard of Oz. Now that is a show I’d love to see in the West End. Thanks to the ash cloud over Europe, the series’ regular musical director was indisposed — apparently flights into and out of Oz are also affected. Accomplished MD Mike Dixon stood in at short notice, though.

After we lost Bronte last week — and while that may have been a shock choice from the voting public, it was hardly “Brontegate” as Graham implied, unless the voting lines had been rigged in some way or some other nefarious activity went on — Andrew did speak up for her future career. Apparently, she has had a couple of good auditions this week, and got her a place at stage school.

While it’s good to see Andrew banging on about the virtues of getting a good musical theatre training, it does sit slightly at odds with his previous criticisms of auditionees he’s seen who’ve come out the other side of that training, and his championing of these shows’ ability to find “raw talent”.

Some of the girls competing this week really do need the additional training that Bronte and other students of musical theatre courses will get. One or two will require some intensive training should they win. However, there are also the odd one or two who could walk into rehearsals quite quickly — if they managed to overcome some of the wobbles in what turned out to be one of the most inconsistent shows yet.

And in a week which was supposed to showcase dance ability, not many of the solo numbers actually included that much dancing…

On to the second week of live shows, and proceedings were conducted under the watchful gaze of one of The Stage’s expert bloggers. Not me, as you’ll have guessed from the use of the word ‘expert’, but critic and daily blogger Mark Shenton, who kept his eye on proceedings from inside the studio. Me, I took my usual space on the sofa, armed only with my eyes and ears, plus all my friends on Twitter.

The show itself decided it had to be even more camp this week, so we had witch-green pyrotechnics, Amy’s jewelled shoes hanging from a chandelier and Graham Norton in a waistcoat that, thankfully, was mostly obscured by an equally hideous jacket.

After a so-so group version of Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead (how good would that have been as an exit song?), Andrew announced that Sheila had been working on the girls’ acting (hurrah), especially as there’s a difference between acting for a large West End stage and for the TV cameras — something that we’ve commented on in series past. Of course, Sheila being Sheila and bearing no truck with the artifice of television, she later revealed that she had little more than 15 minutes with each girl at the start of the week, so there was less focus than might have been.

And, sadly, it showed in all too many of the solo performances.

And so the real battle commenced, after last week’s not-live show. Thankfully the horrendous opening titles seem to have been shortened somewhat, although they still include some tortuously painful grimacing from Andrew Lloyd Webber.

And in the studio, a huge pair of ruby stilettos encompass the orchestra, with a rather more usually sized pair sitting in a glass dome in front of Andrew. Because this programme just wasn’t camp enough before.

As usual, each contestant has been given their signature colour, here recreated as a slightly slutty version of Judy Garland’s gingham outfit, with umpteen petticoats and see-through tops. An odd choice to represent the youthful innocence of the farmgirl, one might argue. The simpler blue gingham given to the ten wildcards-in-waiting was a much more appropriate design.

But on to the performances - that’s what we’re all here for, isn’t it? All eleven girls are supposed to be singing songs that showcase their leading lady potential. Which is a theme that we’ve had in previous years, but surely it ought to be the theme every week?

During last Friday’s audition footage and Saturday’s selection show, a number of those tweeting as the show went on (including myself, I must admit) were dismissive about one or two of the actresses taking part as being too old for the role.

For the most part, most of such comments stem not from any sense of ageism (which would of course be illegal) but more a reaction to the character of Dorothy that is so well known from the movie adaptation of L Frank Baum’s books.

In the comments to my review of Saturday’s show, some similar discussion took place. First of all, Jim opined:

…she has to be credible as a teenage girl, and appear so against the rest of the cast. For me that counts a number of them out straight away, either through age or physical size… She has to lead this whole production, have the skill and experience to do that, and yet still appear 16! I just hope the voting public know what they’re doing.

And that was followed up by Sue:

In the book Dorothy is 9 & Judy Garland had to famously have her bust flattened to make her appear pre-pubescent.

But ALW made a comment about Dorothy being 16 - does this indicate that they’re changing it.

I don’t remember Andrew Lloyd Webber making a comment like that, but even if he did it’s not really unreasonable. As Jim said, Dorothy must be the lead role in a musical and there are very practical reasons why a production team may not want to create yet another West End show where the title role must be shared out due to employment laws (cf. Billy Elliot and, of course, Oliver!).

After Friday’s sojourn in Dorothy Farm, it was into the studio for the selection of the final ten performers from the 20 still in the competition. In previous years, this stage of the selection has been done by putting on a show for Sir Andrew, the panellists, and a handful of celebrity guests, and had been treated almost as quickly as the previous rounds that Friday’s hour skimmed over.

Thankfully, someone in the production office has realised that getting performers to sing and dance might actually make good telly, so the action is moved into the studio that will be used for the live shows. And our eyes were not deceiving us: it was substantially larger than in previous years. As with the callbacks, the action has moved out of TV Centre once more, this time transferring to Wembley’s Fountain Studios, the home of production company TalkbackThames’ other entertainment shows, Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor. Some sense of continuity was maintained in terms of the overall layout, which was very much the I’d Do Anything staging writ large.

The twenty girls still in competition would be split into groups of four, with each group singing two songs, one pop and one musica — whhaaat? Everybody would be singing a musical theatre song in the first studio week? I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto. They do things so differently! Seriously, in previous series you could count the number of songs of stage origin on one hand, so after Friday’s show and now this, there really is a sense of embracing musical theatre at last.

What has always characterised BBC talent show series over any ITV ones has been the reluctance to dwell for too long on the initial audition stages. This is usually because in order to fill out the time, the commercial channel has to spend an inordinate amount of time on the hopefuls who are actually, um, hopeless.

While Over the Rainbow, as in previous years, has included occasional montages of bad auditions, it’s only ever done in an off-hand style that takes care never to denigrate those auditioning. The girls who turn up and end up screeching may cringe at seeing themselves do so badly in front of a TV audience, but they should rest assured that they go by so quickly that nobody will remember who they are.

Unfortunately, the same can be said of the good singers: everything’s such a whirl. How are we supposed to know who to root for when we hardly meet anyone? The X Factor may be excessive when it takes the best part of two months to go through the initial audition stages — but surely 15 minutes is going too far to the other extreme…?

With Over the Rainbow starting on Friday to find a new Dorothy for the Wizard of Oz, new panellist John Partridge took time at the press launch to talk to our broadcasting correspondent Matthew Hemley about his role on the show — and the role of similar shows in modern musical theatre.

If you don’t have a brilliant agent or you don’t know the casting agent, you would not get seen to play this role. The fact we open it out this way means thousands of girls who would never have an opportunity to get seen are seen. And lots of things happen because of that… Look at Connie Fisher and Lee Mead. These were people who were hustling in the West End to get a break and could not get one. Now they have one.

…The days of the show being the star or the composer being the star are goine. You do need somebody to a degree to help a show run — to help bring people in. Also, tickets are very expensive now and people want to know what the are getting. That is just the way it is.

The full interview is in this week’s print edition of The Stage, and is also available on our podcast. Either subscribe, download and listen with iTunes or listen to a streaming version on the podcast blog.

Our full Over the Rainbow coverage will continue here on TV Today, starting with reviews of this weekend’s forthcoming audition and selection shows and continuing throughout the run.

The BBC’s latest theatrical recruitment series, Over the Rainbow, starts with its first pre-recorded show on Friday, and so the promotional items on the Corporation’s website are starting to drip out slowly.

This year, the let’s-do-anything-but-call-it-Boot-Camp phase of the show is “Dorothy Farm”, where the prospective Gale girls are actually holed up in a barn during the series of workshops that will help panellists Sheila Hancock, John Partridge and Charlotte Church whittle the auditionees down to just 20 actresses.

This montage of clips from the Dorothy Farm stage is, I must admit, a little too reliant on Charlotte Church for my liking. Hopefully that’s more down to the selection of clips for the montage: these panels work best when all three experts are equally vocal, but purely on the basis of this clip, it seems that Church’s vocal insistence meets little resistance from Partridge or Hancock. We’ll see on Friday whether that pans out into the full-length show…

• Over the Rainbow, Friday 9pm and Saturday 6.30pm, BBC1.
• Tomorrow’s edition of The Stage Podcast will feature a conversation with EastEnder and Over the Rainbow panellist John Partridge. Listen online or in iTunes.

She may be playing a nun in the current West End production of Sister Act, but it seems that in real life Sheila Hancock is far from saintly.

Speaking at today’s launch for Over the Rainbow, BBC1’s new Saturday night talent show aimed at casting a young female actress as Dorothy in a major new Andrew Lloyd-Webber-produced production of The Wizard of Oz, Hancock revealed that she is slightly concerned that her tongue might land her in trouble come the live shows of the series.

“The thing I most worry about is swearing. I do swear a great deal,” she admitted. That may frighten the producers, but it’s the girls taking part in the show who might want to be wary of Hancock.

The actress, attending today’s launch alongside fellow panelists for the show, Charlotte Church and John Partridge, does not look like she will hold back on saying what she really thinks.

She told today’s audience at the Café de Paris that she hopes some of the girls who are taking part may find themselves “giving up the business”.

“I mean that sincerely. If they can’t survive this they should not be in the business. They really shouldn’t and some will drop out.”

Not that Hancock thinks any of the contestants taking part are going to be made a laughing stock.

Speaking today she made it clear that Over the Rainbow is not out to poke fun at any contestant, unlike other programmes.

She revealed that a lot of this year’s contestants have had training of some sort, and aren’t “all people who have walked off the streets”.

“In some reality shows, people are chosen because they are laughably bad, so that the nation and panelists can laugh at them. It’s not like that on this show, it really isn’t. We are looking for talent.”