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By Diane Vadino
Special to MSN TV
"America's
Got Talent" is back with a vengeance, says our host Nick
Cannon, who I am enjoying more and more as a sort of real-life entry point
to the separate and very different fantasy worlds inhabited by our judges and
our contestants. Of course, when your go-to guy for the man-on-the-street's
perspective is actually married to Mariah Carey, we understand that everything on the entire
Earth is relative, which we see from above, as we hurtle through the American
sky to the "AGT" stage: splits! Nose tricks! Fire acts! Backward-feet walking
dude! That guy who put the hook through his nose!
Curiously, only that last act got through to Vegas; the rest have been banished to community center stages and church basements until the end of time. There's the guy who serenaded the Hoff, and the Stepford Dance Moppets, the flying Australian dog, magician Drew Thomas, the fiddling Polish triplets, and, of course, "the pride of America" (according to English Piers, so whatever on that): brothers-and-sister trio Voices of Glory. Week 1, consider yourself recapped.
Tonight, we're taking things to a whole new level -- of nausea (Nick's), bloodiness (some dude's), and patented, leaning-over dance moves (Michael Jackson's, rather poignantly). Plus: chicken catchers. What else could this be but "America's Got Talent"? Let's do this.
New York
Back in New York again? The geography of
this show continues to astound me. An extra from "The
Sopranos" reminds us that New York has the greatest talent on the planet.
Enter Piers (slapping hands with, from the expression on his face, the crowd's
swine flu sufferers); Sharon (slapping hands enthusiastically); and the Hoff
(barreling through the crowd like the bull on Prada loafers we know him to be).
First up: 62-year-old Jersey City supermarket cashier Carol Lugo, who could, by the way, totally be a Lauren Hutton-style J. Crew model, and who dances -- I truly don't know the words to describe that dance. "Bizarre but wonderfully bizarre," Sharon says. Hoff, who's on his feet and looks like he's about to break into shout-y tears, just thinks it's "awesome." Piers proposes that she might singlehandedly rescue the country from recession. Carol's through, and she moonwalks offstage.
Moving on: Sharon tells Joseph Harris ("aka Yo-Yo Joe") that "all those yo-yo fanatics in America" -- demographic of one, I would have thought -- "need to be represented by you." He's through. So are the dance troupe Diva League, which has out-drag-queened the drag queen stylings of the Pussycat Dolls, and Chris Allison ("aka Coney Island Chris"), who appears to have eaten a light bulb.
We open the next segment to the tune of the Pussycat Dolls' "When I Grow Up." Callback, there. Despite the expect-a-schlub intro music, Jay Mattioli is revealed to be a rather adorable, disappearing magician whom Piers thinks has "star quality." He's through, leaving the stage to be sucked into the vortex of his even more adorable father's bear hug.
Chicago
We're back in Chicago. In addition to talent,
Chicago has pizza, burgers, Route 66, and a river. There's an awful lot of
schadenfreude in the air as juvenile court judge Franklin Sane massacres
"Downtown," and it's all extremely cringe-y. Soft-piano intro (SPI) guarantees
success, however, for 14-year-old Thia Megia singing Jennifer Holliday's "I Am
Changing" -- her huge voice is at such intense odds with her tiny little body
that at first I think she's lip-syncing.
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