What we expect from ‘Voice Kids 3’

Elha Nympha

THE FIRST two editions of “The Voice Kids” produced promising and precocious discoveries like Lyca Gairanod, Elha Nympha, Darren Espanto, Juan Karlos Labajo and Esang de Torres. So we expect “The Voice Kids 3,” which starts telecasting tonight to be felicitously productive, if not even more so.

Practice makes perfect, after all—if lessons are studiously learned, and people make it a point to listen to the voice of experience.

Having made some mistakes the first time around, we hope that the third edition of the kiddie singing tilt more enlightenedly taps contestants who are really children, not adolescents, tweens or even teens who should be auditioning—someplace else!

Ideal contestants

The ideal kiddie singing tilt contestants should be between 5 and 9 years young—no older, unless the kid is really small and still childlike. Fact is, we’ve worked in musical productions with truly precocious singers as young as 3 years old, and they did a good job, acquitting themselves like the tiny pros they were. But they were the rare exceptions, so the “5 to 9” age range is more reliably workable.

Some people have a problem with this, because they feel that really young singers are vocally limited to sustain viewers’ interest for the long term. We beg to disagree, because we believe that child singers’ unique contribution and value is precisely the simplicity and innocence of their “still developing” voices.

Lyca Gairanod

To expect them to sound “fuller” or “older” is to miss the point of their special appeal to listeners: They remind adults of a younger, simpler and more innocent time gone by, when they were full of hope and promise. Listeners yearn to remember that golden time from their own childhood, to retroactively plug into their younger, truer selves.

If a juvenile singer sounds too fully developed, slick and polished, that tender, fragile moment can’t be tapped into and temporarily reclaimed, so the “magic” is lost.

Related to this key insight is our hope that the kiddie singing tilt will not assign love songs for its current batch of young hopefuls to interpret. The first time around, we were thrown off when a tiny girl trendily sang out loud and lustily about being “on fire” and inappropriately “passionate” stuff like that.

—If something like that happens this time around, somebody should douse the smoldering little spitfire with a pitcher full of iced water—quick!