In an earlier post, I had wondered why there were all these montages of the audition kids singing the same song. In Minneapolis, it was "Kiss" by Prince. Seattle had "Doncha" by the Pussycat Dolls and I remember an "All Night Long" (Lionel Richie) montage as well.
Well, I just stumbled across my answer in TVweek.com's interview with executive producer, Nigel Lythgoe (familiar to us as the Simon-esque judge from So You Think You Can Dance).
Here's an excerpt from the interview:
Mr. Ross: I loved the montage about "All Night Long," I thought that was wonderful.
Mr. Lythgoe: What we does is we say, when you come along to the audition, you're going to do the song you've chosen to sing, but we'd also like you to sing this song. And on this occasion it was "All Night Long," because we want to test out your memory, because on the day after, on the results show, you will be singing a song that you will learn overnight. …So we want to make sure-they're going on live television-that they've got a good memory, and are able to master the lyrics of any song. So we give them the lyrics, and they sit there all morning or all afternoon and they learn the lyrics and they come and sing us a little bit of the song. But what happens in that, is their memories do go, and we do have the funniest moments ever, which is why we do that. But they do that, in truth, before the judges judge them, so that does not come into their audition.
Complete interview can be found here.
1 fascinating comment(s) from my friends:
Oh good! i had always wondered about that - it seemed to be rigged somehow.
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