America’s Got some weird acts
America’s Got Talent airs the final audition show of the season tonight, and already some things are clear.
“There’s so many weirdoes on that stage,” Howie Mandel said during one recent lull in the steady parade of aging mimes, amateur escape artists, struggling musicians and, at one point, a woman with a urinating squirrel.
America’s Got Talent stretches the definition of talent — and weirdness, in other words — but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some genuinely impressive acts, and affecting moments, scattered intermittently throughout the parade of madness.
Even by America’s Got Talent’s wacky standards, this season is poised to set a new benchmark for weirdness — and entertainment value when you may least expect. Example: there was visibly nervous 19-year-old Goth opera singer and Marilyn Manson look-alike Andrew De Leon in one recent audition episode. He appeared onstage in metal spike bracelets and heavy guyliner, insisted he’d never performed in public before, and then reared back and performed Ave Maria as if he were Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.
“I’m just so used to being rejected,” he said afterward. “I’m not really good at anything, so this is amazing.”
Mandel might have seen a weirdo when De Leon first walked onstage to a sea of smirks — “Rough day at the office?” fellow judge Howard Stern said when he first laid eyes on De Leon — but Mandel wasn’t seeing a weirdo now. “It’s not that you’re good at anything,” Mandel told De Leon. “You are great.”
Then there was larger-than-life 50-something singer-musician “Ulysses” Long, looking a little like the love child of Neil deGrasse Tyson and boxing promoter Don King, who launched into a so-smooth rendition of the theme song from The Love Boat. For a moment there, Mandel and fellow judges Howard Stern and Sharon Osbourne looked as if they didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“I haven’t heard that song since the early ’80s,” Mandel told him. “It was not expected. I did not expect that to come out of you. The whole thing is amazing; you’re like a package. You’re the whole package . . . adult contemporary 1976.”
De Leon and Long are both through to the next round, which begins June 25 in Las Vegas. Long is, forgive the pun, the longest of long shots, but De Leon is already a YouTube sensation. His AGT audition had drawn nearly two million views, as of last week.
(NBC, Citytv – 9 p.m.)