Milwaukee native Ronda Felton’s duet partner collapses on ‘Idol’
Milwaukee native Ronda Felton advanced on “American Idol” Monday during the Hollywood Week Duets Challenge.
But after getting the good news from judge Lionel Richie, Felton admitted, “I can’t say I am happy in this moment.” Minutes earlier, she had watched her singing partner, Funke Lagoke, collapse on the “Idol” stage shortly after their performance.
It was a frightening scene — “traumatic,” Richie called it — with Felton, “Idol” judge Luke Bryan and medical personnel holding an unconscious Lagoke.
“I am just worried about her health more than anything,” Felton said through tears after Lagoke was transported to a Los Angeles hospital from the Dolby Theatre. “I feel like that’s the No. 1 thing right now. I just want her to know that I love her and I care about her and I want her to be OK.”
Lagoke will be OK. She collapsed from dehydration — Bryan said she would receive stitches from the facefirst fall — but Lagoke also advanced, and according to a caption on Monday’s episode, will return for the next round of the “Idol” competition.
Felton, now based in Phoenix, quickly became a frontrunner and fan favorite on “Idol” after her episodeclosing audition Feb. 28 that brought Richie to tears.
Felton also discussed her difficult upbringing during that audition, living with a single mother who struggled to make ends meet — at times they were homeless — and attending 12 to 15 schools by the time she was a teenager.
Those struggles were clearly weighing heavily on Felton’s mind as she prepared her duet with Lagoke of Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion’s 1997 collaboration “Tell Him.”
“I don’t feel like I deserve to be here,” Felton said on the show. “I have been told so many times growing up my dreams are too big, I’m never going to amount to anything. Coming from being as poor as I was and being homeless, I don’t want to get my hopes too high just for nothing to happen in the end.”
Richie watched Felton and Lagoke rehearse and offered some advice: “I’m not worried about perfection. The biggest part is to get out of your head.”
And Lagoke, too, helped Felton fight her insecurities.
“Your talent brought you here,” Lagoke told Felton at one point Monday. “Your gift brought you here.”
“For someone to be just patient with you and just nurture you, it’s just heaven sent,” Felton said of Lagoke.
Performing under their self-appointed stage name “Melanated Queens,” Felton and Lagoke had some strong moments, but there was some shakiness as well, perhaps due to Lagoke’s condition.
“Tonight was a train wreck,” Richie said in his critique, before it was clear that Lagoke was not feeling well. Richie suggested that Felton seemed confident at the start, but by the end of the performance, she “crashed and burned.”
Nevertheless, Felton and Lagoke will appear on the show’s “Showstopper” rounds, which will air on ABC March 28 and 29.
“We’re here for you,” Richie told a shaken-up Felton Monday after Lagoke’s collapse. “We’re a family.”
Contact Piet at (414) 223-5162 or plevy@journalsentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter at @pietlevy or Facebook at facebook.com/PietLevyMJS.
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