The real ticket to child stardom

Last June 26, we caught the second telecast of the new kiddie contest, “I Shine Talent Camp,” and were gratified to see that the focus was now more clearly on the child finalists, and no longer on their stage parents. The telecast’s attempts to turn the kids into good program hosts were aided by the earnest efforts of mentors like Jolina Magdangal and Maita Ponce.

Ultimately, however, their one-shot mentoring didn’t produce outstanding kiddie hosts, because that takes much more than just a single session.

The best that can happen within such a brief time frame is for the kids to learn how to deliver their spiels in a crisp, lively manner to begin to understand that the projection of their personalities and the ad-lib expression of their own thoughts and feelings are similarly important.

Tilts that aim to develop really young TV talents should look into the outstanding work turned in a long time ago by precious “kiddie superstar” talents like Niño Muhlach and Aiza Seguerra.

Both pint-sized stars began performing on TV when they were only 3 years old. At that very tender age, they were really too young to “train,” but they clicked with viewers just the same, due to their unique personalities, their ability to ad-lib in a bright and spontaneously interesting way, and their basic, inborn “smarts.”

That’s the real ticket to stardom for child talents—inborn personality and “smarts,” rather than formal workshops and training. In fact, formal training sessions could even end up “curdling” fresh talents by making them too self-conscious and “aware” of what they are doing.

When it comes to really young talents, spontaneity is what wins viewers over, not precious proficiency and trained competence.

Compare how Niño and Aiza were at the start of their TV careers to how many young talents currently perform on the tube: Aiza and Niño blew viewers away because they came up with innocent and unexpected zingers (“from the mouths of babes,” and all that).

On the other hand, most of today’s child talents try to get by with performing cliches and knee-jerk, push-button shticks—relentless “cuteness,” porma, siga, ack-ack delivery, shouting and screaming, frenetic dancing, birit singing, making goo-goo eyes, etc. You know the drill.

Note that most of the pint-sized perpetrators of these mindless and knee-jerk excesses are taught (wrongly) by their “stage parents.” In addition, note that most of those kids remain at starlet level throughout their brief careers—precisely because they perform as frenetically as everybody else, rather than focusing on their own personalities and ad-libbing abilities.

That’s the bottom line: In discovering future child stars, look for smart, spontaneous ad-libbers with strong personalities, like Niño and Aiza. But they shouldn’t imitate those two former superstars. They should be unique and true to themselves.